by Paul Raeburn Kevin Zollman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2016
Tantalizing perspectives on cultivating sharing, honesty, and cooperation via game theory.
Game theory strategies to handle everyday parental quandaries, especially the unpleasant variety.
For those who cannot quite grasp the significance of the prisoner’s dilemma, then game theory may seem a rarefied guide to parenting. However, Raeburn (Do Fathers Matter?, 2014, etc.) and Zollman (Philosophy/Carnegie Mellon Univ.) put the math on the back burner and bring the commonsensicality of the theory to the fore. Game theory is about how we play, interact, and negotiate, where doing one thing will affect what the other does in response. It is about strategy and anticipation, and while “game theory can get complicated,” write the authors, “in most situations you need to know only three things: the players, their preferences, and what they can do.” Most parents appreciate their children’s preferences and abilities, so the game is on. Raeburn and Zollman begin with a simple example: cake cutting. Their remedy: “one cuts, and one picks.” This is equitable, but if half the cake is chocolate and half vanilla, it may not be optimally gratifying if you get the less-desired flavor. From there, game theory helps us with measures (and evolutionary value) of fairness, how we divvy things that can’t be cut up, and the “mix of economics and psychology that recognizes how motivations other than money shape…decisions that seem to defy classical economics”—i.e., behavioral economics. There is a fluid, natural feel to the authors’ examples, such as self-enforcing contracts and the hot thinking vs. cool thinking behind self-control. Only occasionally do they tender the obvious—e.g., “being consistent will help.” But even that seemingly apparent piece of advice follows from their discussion of Kidd’s theory, as does the proposal to explain “why they will have a better life if they act as moral people.”
Tantalizing perspectives on cultivating sharing, honesty, and cooperation via game theory.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-16001-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2016
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by Helen Fremont ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 11, 2020
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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by Laura Schroff and Alex Tresniowski ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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by Laura Schroff & Alex Tresniowski ; illustrated by Barry Root
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