A solid compendium of love, lessons, and constructive homework.
An exploration of the complex psychology of relationships.
Kim and Bennett have more in common than just being therapists and self-admitted “flawed and complicated humans.” They are also a committed, unmarried couple. With a smooth balance of advice and affable humor, the authors present the keys to a proactive, durable relationship, reiterating the lessons they’ve learned from their own time together. While the authors accept that people crave finding “the one,” the procession of simmering romance, marriage, family, and career growth can be a challenge. Kim and Bennett dig into a variety of barriers that hinder the development and maintenance of successful relationships—e.g., intimacy ambivalence and the pressures of familial upbringing (Kim’s parents, who “are old school Korean, taught him to “push feelings down)”—and the ways couples can break down these barricades both separately and together. In addition to candid stories about their own ongoing learning curve, the authors relate client experiences that reflect common challenges for anyone in a committed relationship. Their advice ranges from obvious (“passion and intensity aren’t enough to build and sustain a relationship”) to more nuanced, like how to navigate the emotional contours of mutual intimacy and suppressed “anger, resentment, or eggshells.” Alternating narration, the authors provide unique opinions and philosophies on a variety of relationship topics, including attachment styles, effective communication strategies, the ever present pitfalls of codependency, jealousy, and unhealthy behavioral patterns. The authors end each chapter with “Questions To Ask Yourself” and a section called “The Practice,” which challenges readers to apply what they have learned. Consistently encouraging, the authors are convincing in their assertion that a healthy, productive, mutually gratifying love connection is achievable with the proper tools and a willingness to look inward and put in the work. “You can only be responsible for yourself and how you show up,” they write. “How your partner shows up and the amount of effort they put in is entirely on them.”
A solid compendium of love, lessons, and constructive homework.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-320631-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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