An informative and supportive collection of interviews about mental health.
Hun presents interviews conducted with health care professionals in 2021 in Singapore.
As the author reminds his readers, the world is currently going through a mental health epidemic, with more people than ever experiencing various levels of depression and anxiety. He notes that there’s still a stigma attached to this epidemic, largely derived from an often clumsy and superficial conception of emotions. “Our understanding of emotions is largely limited to happiness, anger, and sadness, but what about everything else in between?” he asks. “What about the subtle emotions like guilt, jealousy, shame, disgust, contempt, and envy?” In these pages, Hun presents dozens of interviews he conducted with various health care professionals—doctors, caregivers, therapists, social workers, and others—on the front lines of Singapore’s ongoing campaign to provide the care that many people are only vaguely aware they need. Calvin Eng, president of the Association for Music Therapy in Singapore, for example, notes that “as long as the individual is open to exploring music and being part of the experience,” his own clients can find peace and resolution through his “jam sessions.” Other health care workers discuss the shame some people feel about their worst episodes, and the corrosive effects of stress (“Your mind goes into tunnel vision, and you stop being able to think creatively”). The interviews are uniformly conducted with skill, and the balance of subjects makes for a smoothly engaging read. Hun ensures that the reading experience is also consistently upbeat; the narrative line running through the text and interviews alike is that, no matter how grim things might seem for readers, there’s always hope. “There is always a way out,” Hun writes, “no matter how bad circumstances present themselves to you.” In a sentiment that many will value, he reminds readers that there’s no shame in admitting they need help.
An informative and supportive collection of interviews about mental health.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2022
ISBN: 9789815058277
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Penguin Random House SEA
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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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