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FIRES IN THE DARK

Name: FIRES IN THE DARK
Author: Kay Redfield Jamison
ISBN: 9780525657170

HEALING THE UNQUIET MIND

by Kay Redfield Jamison ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 23, 2023

A humane, elegantly written contribution to the literature of trauma and care.

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A scholar of psychology and psychiatry examines some of the changing regimes by which the mentally troubled are treated.

Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind, Touched With Fire, and Night Falls Fast, opens with a graceful portrait of Sir William Osler (1849-1919), the medical pioneer recognized by American doctors a century later as “the most influential physician in history.” Osler explored many aspects of medicine, but much of what concerned him toward the end of his life had to do with the death of his son, who was badly injured on the Western Front. Returned to combat, he died there. “Death had been Osler’s tutor for the shadowland,” writes Jamison. “As a young pathologist he had performed nearly a thousand autopsies; he was keenly aware of the debt owed by the living to the dead.” Now it was personal, and he and some of his peers urged physicians to use the same attentive and loving care nurses delivered, with the charge to “bear witness to suffering, not flinch from it; be still with it and apprehend its meaning.” Those mind-oriented physicians had plenty to do when unfortunate veterans such as the poet Siegfried Sassoon, shellshocked and tormented, sought postwar care. (Said one physician to Sassoon, while on home leave before returning to the front, “you appear to be suffering from an anti-war complex.”) Jamison moves on to a consideration of the ancient connections of healing, ritual, and magic, some of which come into play in modern therapy. Along the way, while looking further at stress- and trauma-borne illness, the author studs her narrative with luminous figures such as Paul Robeson and Robert Graves, whose book Goodbye to All That was “a bitter, unsentimental account of war, atrocity, and death.” There the hero quest and its challenges come in, and, Jamison concludes memorably: “There is a cost for this, and to redeem it we look to our healers.”

A humane, elegantly written contribution to the literature of trauma and care.

Pub Date: May 23, 2023

ISBN: 9780525657170

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
ROBERT LOWELL, SETTING THE RIVER ON FIRE
by Kay Redfield Jamison

- BOOK REVIEW
NOTHING WAS THE SAME
by Kay Redfield Jamison

- BOOK REVIEW
EXUBERANCE
by Kay Redfield Jamison

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THINK YOU'LL BE HAPPY

MOVING THROUGH GRIEF WITH GRIT, GRACE, AND GRATITUDE

by Nicole Avant ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 17, 2023

Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.

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Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.

“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”

Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.

Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023

ISBN: 9780063304413

Page Count: 288

Publisher: HarperOne

Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...

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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.