Rendon offers not just a spoonful of medicine, but also a furtherance of works by Frankl, Abraham Maslow, and his new,...
Journalist Rendon examines the question of how trauma changes people, reshaping their lives and senses of self.
The author opens with a story about this father, a survivor of the terrifying and grotesque Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. His father carries serious baggage—“I joke with him that the Nazis won’t shoot him if we are late for a dinner reservation. He usually looks at me like he’s not so sure”—but he is also humorous, compassionate, friendly, and empathetic. After trauma, Rendon’s research has convinced him—and likely will convince readers—that a return to the old normalcy is rarely achievable. It may not even be desirable. “[Trauma] is transformative”—not always for the good, but more often than one might think. The author’s journey of discovery takes him through the literature, from psychiatrists encountering a blossoming of inner strength, openness, and life appreciation in the traumatized; to Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy; to the ins and outs of positive psychology; to neurological and cultural factors that come into the recuperative (or nonrecuperative) picture. Much of the information the author relates is straightforward and common-sensical—e.g., “It is the mid-range experience,” neither mild nor utterly eviscerating trauma, “where most studies show the greatest potential for growth”—but the book is also full of stories of lasting, seismic traumas handled by men and women in remarkable ways, giving the book the valuable, practical aspect of a guide to confronting PTSD. Rendon examines how to train optimism, how to find absorption and nurture creativity in new experiences, how camaraderie and support lead to gratitude and commitment, and how “when you decide to struggle, you say I am going to elect to be challenged. You are enlivened.”
Rendon offers not just a spoonful of medicine, but also a furtherance of works by Frankl, Abraham Maslow, and his new, revitalized acquaintances.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6163-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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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