An unusual self-help book, of particular use to those contemplating writing a memoir or otherwise revisiting their past.
“Life is the story you tell yourself.” So writes the bestselling author, encouraging readers to discover that story for themselves.
The meaning of our lives becomes clear only through storytelling: How did you survive being rejected in work or love? How did you make your way through divorce, illness, war? One thing that storytelling tells us is that the arc of life is never so neat as a fairy tale. Feiler writes that while many of us assume the path of life is one of upward progress, we “are shocked to discover they oscillate instead.” It seems unlikely that any adult would be so shocked, but the assertion makes a useful hook on which the author hangs the idea that lives have different shapes—some butterflies, some spirals, some, to borrow from the British, pears. Feiler continues, abandoning notions of linearity for the sloppy, unpredictable courses that we live, whether through life-threatening illness or accident, drug addiction, the loss of job or loved one, and so forth. He is generous in opening his pages to the stories of others by way of illustration. One of the most affecting relates the tale of the granddaughter of Gen. George Patton, who had been born into wealth and prestige and abandoned it to become a nun—a path that did not happen overnight, thanks to an abbess who ordered her to go live a little beforehand, marking the transition to holy orders thus: “Go slow; insist on deep, personal reflection; mark each stage of the journey with carefully constructed rituals that delineate and demarcate the new status achieved.” That seems a useful mantra for lives lived in the secular world as well, and Feiler provides plenty of examples as well as a well-constructed set of questions as prompts for reflection.
An unusual self-help book, of particular use to those contemplating writing a memoir or otherwise revisiting their past.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59420-682-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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
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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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