Depression and anxiety are at epidemic levels; this book offers an alternative path to a fulfilling, productive life.
A social psychologist shows how perfectionism can hold you back from real achievement and points the way out of the dilemma.
Curran, a psychology professor at the London School of Economics, shows how we are experiencing record levels of burnout, hypercompetitiveness, depression, and anxiety. The reason, he argues, is perfectionism, an impulse that runs through everything from work to personal attractiveness. It is relentless, impossible to satisfy, and inherently dangerous to mental well-being. Curran examines it from various perspectives and provides a self-diagnostic tool called the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale. Many perfectionists think of themselves as highly productive, but that belief is not supported by the evidence. In fact, perfectionists often repeat the same task over and over again rather than looking for innovations and alternatives. They can also be intolerant of others, which is disruptive in the workplace and in relationships. Still, perfectionism is ubiquitous. We are constantly bombarded with messages telling us to be better, strive harder, and consume more. The filtered, glossy images of social media set impossible standards that cannot be met, although some people go to enormous lengths in attempts to do so. Curran offers solid suggestions on how to avoid the perfection impulse and move into “the Republic of Good Enough.” The best way is with measured steps, coupled with realistic goals and an understanding of where you actually want to go in your life. Unfortunately, he wanders off the point in the final chapter, when he discusses sociopolitical reforms like a universal basic income and progressive taxation. This section has a tinny tone that clashes with the sturdy research of the rest of the book. However, the author delivers many useful lessons and valuable insights, and that might be quite good enough.
Depression and anxiety are at epidemic levels; this book offers an alternative path to a fulfilling, productive life.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982149536
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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