Forthright and well-written, but essentially superficial.
As part of her ongoing work as an “immersion journalist” (Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man, 2006, etc.), Vincent checked into three different mental institutions; she found the experience both numbing and life-changing.
Having battled periods of depression throughout her life, and being well-acquainted with the use of medications such as Lamictal and Prozac, the author had no trouble getting admitted for an average two-week stay as a patient in the three institutions: Meriwether, a public Bedlam in the Northeast; St. Luke’s, a small Catholic hospital “in the middle of the plains”; and a private rehab facility called Mobius, specializing in “process therapy.” She rates and compares them, admitting from the start that she is deeply suspicious of the way the medical profession handles mental illness, the causes and mechanisms of which remain little understood. Treatments ranged from comforting and stabilizing to abusive and perfunctory. The aggressiveness with which doctors pushed drugs on their addled patients, especially at Meriwether, shocked Vincent. She resolved not to take hers and observed that in comparison to her heavily doped ward-mates, she “enjoyed a comparatively stunning range of motion and mental agility.” Her account is replete with compassionate descriptions of fellow inmates. Some were more hardened than others, but all craved the merest glimmer of recognition of their humanity. Healing, the author realized after her stay at Mobius, cannot be achieved at any institution without the active participation of the patient, and even at the fancy rehab clinic the patients were rarely receptive; thus containment and medication remained the norm. Vincent is a sharp observer and an intelligent analyst, but she doesn’t provide any context to help readers understand the larger issues involved. She utterly ignores the vast literature on mental illness, from Freud and Foucault to Mary Jane Ward and Kay Redfield Jamison, and doesn’t include a bibliography.
Forthright and well-written, but essentially superficial.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-01971-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
