A solid overview of how psychology, rather than violence, might provide the way to peace.
An attempt “to forge a comprehensive, provocative, and accessible narrative about the Israeli mind.”
Israeli-American clinical psychologist Gratch (If Love Could Think: Using Your Mind to Guide Your Heart, 2005, etc.), based in New York, uses his background as a sabra (an Israeli Jew born in Israel), combined with humor and anecdotal evidence, to provide a useful exploration of Israeli national character traits, most of which he shares. The “outside-inside” approach is compelling, though admittedly, the author is wading into perilous waters; a fellow scholar warned him that “the very concept of national character could be racist.” Yet as a psychologist, Gratch is fascinated by group action and conflict resolution. First, he delves into the trauma and fragmentation inherent in the Israeli makeup: the endurance of cycles of war and peace, followed by immigrant arrival and absorption, dramatic change, instability, and forced adaptability. Israelis are hugely polarized along right-left lines and largely secular yet devoted to the national Jewish founding (i.e., biblical) myth, although Gratch shows how each side is passionately attracted to its opposite—a reflection of Freud’s concept of reaction formation. The author offers astute observations regarding the mind and actions of the narcissist. On one hand, the Jews’ self-identity as the chosen people allowed them a self-aggrandizing role in history; on the other hand, their “outsized” accomplishments in all fields over the ages have resulted from a “compensatory drive” to overcome their sense of insignificance. Another facet of Israeli narcissism, Gratch notes, is the lack of empathy, revealed in the inability to understand and experience the plight of their neighbors, the Palestinians. More troubling than the Israeli disrespect for authority and penchant for cutting corners is the deeply internalized sense of victimization that manifests in paranoia and defensiveness—a frightening mix vis-à-vis the Iran nuclear crisis and conflict with the Palestinians.
A solid overview of how psychology, rather than violence, might provide the way to peace.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06780-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
