Unquestionably hard to read but an important, veil-lifting book.
A sociologist collects candid, pain-drenched statements from teens who have attempted suicide and offers suggestions on how to help them.
Teenage suicide is extremely difficult to discuss, but Williams (Sociology/New School of Social Research; The Con Men: Hustling in New York City, 2015, etc.), no stranger to tough subjects, jumps headfirst into the task, talking to teens and reading their journals, notes, and letters to comprehend why they attempt to take their own lives. Based on his interviews and the excerpts from the personal journals, readers will acknowledge the many deep and painful secrets that teens often hide. Most of these secrets involve bullying, physical and verbal abuse, drug abuse, incest by one or both parents, or rape by other family members and/or strangers, issues that all lead to isolation, loneliness, and despair on the part of the teen. The more they feel separated from their peers, parents, and other adults, the more they turn to drinking, drugging, cutting, and risky sexual behaviors—anything in order to “get the hurt out on their own,” writes Williams. “They cut their skin. They smoke, snort, drink every day. And when things seem like they are going nowhere, they kill themselves and leave letters behind to remind us they once lived.” The author lets these girls and boys from a variety of backgrounds speak for themselves, making no attempt to correct them in their speech or writing, which lends a power to their voices, including those who sadly succeeded in their suicides. Their testimonies are not easy to confront, but the honesty with which they share their stories far outweighs the readers’ discomfort. “What separates the kids in this book from the rest,” writes the author, “is that they have nowhere to go; no one to talk with; no emotional sustenance, attention, or caring; no direction to turn.”
Unquestionably hard to read but an important, veil-lifting book.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-231-17790-0
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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
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
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