A useful and engaging take on human behavior.
Gelfand (Psychology/Univ. of Maryland) describes the powerful role of social norms.
In 2011, the author and her colleagues conducted a major cross-cultural investigation of the behaviors of some 7,000 people in more than 30 countries. Published in Science, the study led Gelfand to develop the tightness-looseness classification system of cultures that is the focus of this debut. “Tight cultures have strong social norms and little tolerance for deviance, while loose cultures have weak social norms and are highly permissive,” she writes. For example, the United States, a relatively loose culture, tolerates casual norm violations “from littering to jaywalking to dog waste.” Tighter, norm-enforcing Singapore has clean streets and no jaywalkers. In Brazil, a loose culture, people arrive late for business meetings; in Japan, a tight country, trains arrive on time. In these brightly written, sometimes repetitive pages, the author explains how norms and their enforcement can help us better understand organizations and households as well as nations. Norms generally make us a “cooperative species,” as when we stop for a red light, line up, or go quiet in a theater, but their strength and enforcement shape cultural differences. Tight cultures have strict rules and punishments; they provide stability and tradition. Loose cultures foster innovation and rule-breaking. Based on this approach, Gelfand offers many intriguing observations: Cultural shocks, such as terrorism and globalization, drive tightness and often produce autocratic leaders. In the U.S., where “cultural divides run deep,” Donald Trump “masterfully created a climate of threat” and used the “psychology of tightness” to win the presidency. On class differences, she writes, “for those in the lower class, globalization is a looming threat; for those in the upper class, it’s an opportunity.” Other topics include how clashing norms can make moving from the working to upper class painful and the tightness of hospitals, the military, construction, and other life-or-death industries with strict rules.
A useful and engaging take on human behavior.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5293-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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