A brilliantly written, sobering investigation of a secret society within plain sight.
The life and times of a cult that was strange even as cults go.
Prolific journalist Stille examines the Sullivanians, offshoot followers of psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949), “high-performing urban professionals—doctors, lawyers, computer programmers, successful artists and writers, professors—who went to normal jobs by day but returned in the evening to a very different and highly secretive world.” That world, encompassing some major cultural figures, embraced polygamy and polyamory and the group raising of children and abnegation of the nuclear family. Moreover, belonging to it required fealty to a psychologist named Saul Newton and a succession of his wives, one a “rather conventional young woman from a middle-class Jewish family” who tasted power and, by the account of some members, took a tyrannical turn. In the end, it was a sort of Ponzi scheme: “Therapists” unqualified to practice outside the cult took money from lesser “therapists,” and most of it wound up in the hands of the leaders. So it went from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, when some members, awakened by one injury or another, began to drift away. Stille’s onrushing, riveting narrative makes The Blithedale Romance seem like a children’s book by comparison. As Newton and company became worse and worse, he demanding sexual favors from every woman in the Sullivanian orbit, a quiet resistance grew. Surprisingly, children raised collectively and discouraged to seek the identity of their biological parents embarked on that search during adulthood, while a few of the erstwhile leaders came to accept that maybe their program was highly flawed. As with so many cults, the Orwellian principle that some animals are more equal than others shines through always. “Although it was in principle an egalitarian communist group,” Stille writes, “the Sullivanians were remarkably hierarchical, and everyone was aware where they stood at any given moment in the pecking order.”
A brilliantly written, sobering investigation of a secret society within plain sight.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9780374600396
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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