A useful holiday gift at a time when New Year’s resolutions will be on the agenda.
Why being a workaholic is not the key to greater productivity.
“When we stop and rest properly, we’re not paying a tax on creativity. We’re investing in it,” writes Pang (The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul, 2013, etc.). While he is by no means the first to recognize this, the workaholic ethos is still dominant in our culture, to the detriment of our health and personal well-being. Here, the author integrates the latest findings from neuropsychology—e.g., a Dutch study that showed how allowing the mind to wander while performing a demanding task actually improved student performance. Pang suggests that Malcolm Gladwell’s influential thesis in his often cited book Outliers is incomplete. While not disagreeing with Gladwell’s contention that world-class performers will have clocked at least 10,000 practice hours, Pang contends that 12,500 hours of deliberate rest and 30,000 hours of sleep were also necessary. This is not only because rest and sleep are vital to our health, but they also give the mind the opportunity to work on problems offline. While we sleep, memory consolidation takes place. As brain scans have demonstrated, taking a break from a demanding task frees the mind to wander productively. Many creative people accomplish this by walking or napping. Surprisingly, for Winston Churchill, a midafternoon nap was an inflexible part of his routine, even at the height of World War II. Pang decries the modern tendency of people in high-powered jobs to work 24/7, taking work home with them and delaying or foregoing vacations. Not only is this detrimental to family relationships, it actually decreases productivity. Pang also warns that while child-rearing or volunteering are important activities, we also need personal time and space.
A useful holiday gift at a time when New Year’s resolutions will be on the agenda.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-07487-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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