A fascinating, multi-voice look at the many aspects of mental health challenges.
Hun presents a series of discussions about different aspects of mental well-being.
This volume is one in a series by the author (the founder of the arts organization ThisConnect) addressing various aspects of mental health. The book opens with a foreword by Dr. William Wan relating a grim statistic: A recent Singapore mental health survey indicates that one in seven people have experienced some form of mental health challenge. As Hun notes at the beginning of this installment, the Covid-19 pandemic helped to move the conversation about mental health into more common parlance, but understanding of the subject is still lacking. In these pages, he presents the transcripts of conversations he’s had with various people affected by mental health issues that touch on many different aspects of the subject, from dealing with the trauma of suicide to underlining the post-Covid-19 importance of human contact, which a public speaker named Simone stresses in one dialogue: “I can’t emphasize it enough that our brains are configured from the time we’re in hunter-gatherer tribes and need connection,” she maintains. “When we’re not connected, things seem overwhelming.” Throughout the book, Hun stresses his belief that the key to navigating even the worst dark periods is perseverance. This attitude is effectively echoed by most of the interview subjects, including art psychotherapist Rachel Yang, who’s one among many to note the “conscious choice” required to make therapy effective.Hun’s decision to present these interviews as dramatic dialogues stripped of a broader narrative is ultimately a wise one; his approach allows the full power of the concepts to take center stage, making for compelling reading. If the personal voices will help readers see themselves in these talks, all the better.
A fascinating, multi-voice look at the many aspects of mental health challenges.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 9789815058246
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Penguin Random House SEA
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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BOOK REVIEW
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