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
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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