Take the focus of People magazine, add a bit of old-fashioned Gesell or Speck, sprinkle with some trendy phrases on mid-life crises, etc., and you have the essence of Morris' latest. The indefatigable popularizer has decided to celebrate each and every year of human life, from 0 to 100-plus—devoting a full spread to each, and describing growth and development, life expectancy, rites-of-passage and other appropriate psycho/physiological events. There follows a catalogue of who, famous or infamous, suffered misfortune or achieved fame during that particular year: little Mozart playing the harpsichord at three, not to mention Thomas Macaulay voraciously reading, and John Stuart Mill learning Greek. Lots of film stars, TV folk, royalty, robbers, and romancers adorn the pages both in text and pictures. The approach clearly reveals Morris to be a moralizer—intoning on the fate of early misfortune (if not overcome, of course) and recording all those sins. We learn that Baudelaire ("the French poet") died from VD in his mother's arms, having lived a life of notoriety, of hashish and opium, and "offenses against public morality." Calamity Jane is quickly identified as a prostitute. Sirhan Sirhan may not really have killed Robert Kennedy. (The Morris interpretation of history is singular, to say the least.) Natalie Wood, barely cold in her grave, comes up for mention unaccountably often. Queen Anne is the "dull, dowdy and devout monarch" who died at 49. The last entry is Shigechiyo Izumi of Japan: "recognized"—by whom?—"as the oldest man who ever lived" (and who is still living). There follow two pages of concluding remarks that Morris declares to be contradictory: there are similarities at all ages, but the human population is vastly varied. Morris' recipe for ripe old age? An amalgam of good parents, good genes, good sense, good exercise. (Not dull, conscientious jogging or other boring pursuits.) Campy enough to be a smashing addition to the non-book shelf.
Pub Date: March 1, 1983
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1983
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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