A sympathetic and evenhanded treatment of Harlow’s life and work—and an absorbing look at 19th- and 20th-century notions of...
Pulitzer-winning science journalist Blum (Journalism/Univ. of Wisconsin; Sex on the Brain, 1997, etc.) offers a biography of an innovative, controversial psychologist.
Harry Harlow (1905–81) was a deeply troubled man who struggled his whole life with human relationships; yet, in his primate laboratory at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he worked for 44 years, he discovered how love works. Harlow was one of the psychology pioneers in “attachment theory,” the then-revolutionary idea that a close physical relationship between mother and infant was essential to a child’s development. Social skills and adaptability were learned in large part from this important first human relationship. Harlow experimented with numerous variations of “motherhood,” depriving baby monkeys of mothers altogether, substituting warm and cold “cloth moms,” and examining ways in which young monkeys attempted to compensate for their mothers’ absence. Defying long-held views that coddling babies or being over-responsive to their needs would spoil their chances of survival, Harlow showed that those who received the most love often performed best in later life. In the 1960s, he turned his attention to its antithesis—loneliness and depression, work that held new meaning for him as he grieved the premature death from cancer of his beloved wife Peggy. No sooner did Harlow’s work make him famous, however, than his ideas got him into trouble with the emerging women’s movement. His conviction that mothers had a singular capacity as child-rearers flew in the face of a growing feminist consciousness that sought a larger role for women in society. Harlow, a caustic W.C. Fields type with a fondness for drink, only worsened his situation by boldly asserting that biological differences between men and women were immutable and, when angered, flashing misogynistic sentiments in print and at psychology conferences. Toward the end of his life, even many old friends and colleagues chose to avoid him.
A sympathetic and evenhanded treatment of Harlow’s life and work—and an absorbing look at 19th- and 20th-century notions of child psychology.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7382-0278-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Perseus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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