A luminous, intellectually dense meditation on mind.
A lucid examination of the self in crisis.
For 18 months, Arikha, a philosopher and author of Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours, attended weekly clinical meetings in the neuropsychiatry unit of the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, observing patients who presented difficult, sometimes bizarre, symptoms to their assembled medical team. Like neurologists Oliver Sacks and Antonio Damasio, Arikha, who calls herself a “science humanist,” reflects on these patients in her investigation of overarching questions about consciousness, identity, affliction, and memory. The many cases include a woman in her 30s who could not recall 10 years of her life; a man whose personality split into two identities; an 82-year-old woman, nearly blind, experiencing visual hallucinations; a 50-something married father of five who felt haunted, hearing things and sensing invisible presences. Some symptoms were somatic: One woman’s hand became “the locus for all her anxiety, fear and frustration.” One man lost all feeling on his left side and then could not form new memories. Prominent among these cases was Arikha’s mother, a poet and memoirist who was sinking inexorably into dementia, her memory “shunting her from place to place, as if she were ice skating blindfolded.” Her mother’s mind takes a central place in this wide-ranging, engaging study that encompasses philosophy, history, medicine, memoir, and science. “This book,” she writes, “is about both the self as it studies itself, and the self as it loses itself”; how each of us makes our felt experiences coherent; how memory affirms our identity; and the ease with which our “planned trajectories” can rupture and plummet us into illness. “Our self in time,” writes the author, “is but a thin gauze wrapped around the shifting elements we are made of.” The book is also about the limits of medical and scientific knowledge to treat patients who defy categorization, to empathize with their experience, and to ameliorate their pain.
A luminous, intellectually dense meditation on mind.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5416-0087-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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