An accessible, clear guide on maintaining realistic relationship goals.
A self-help book that upends the myth of perfect partnerships.
Nerenberg, an experienced psychologist specializing in addiction and relationships, says, “Our culture endlessly promotes the illusion of relationship perfection through movies, TV, and even our use of social media.” She uses the term “perfectly imperfect” to define the book’s ideal outcomes for readers. We all have flaws and imperfections, but accepting and understanding those imperfections will help readers improve their relationships. She emphasizes that all long-term bonds encounter ruptures and repairs. Nerenberg uses pop culture references to create a conversational tone and relies on case studies to give concrete examples of successful strategies. For example, she refers to the Alcoholic Anonymous concept of “character defects” to help couples recognize their own unhelpful reactions, like resentment, anger, or self-pity, that undermine their communication. In describing one couple’s journey, Nerenberg writes, “Once the illusion of a perfect relationship was shattered, they began to participate in the hard work of building an honest, more genuine connection.” Nerenberg also shares candid accounts of her own experiences to demonstrate some of her lessons, and this vulnerability strengthens her message. Each chapter ends with a series of exercises (e.g., the reader is asked to list one way they have helped and one way they have hurt their current and past relationships in order to understand their own behavior). Though the takeaways, like limiting social media and setting boundaries, aren’t necessarily new, they are enhanced with practical exercises and compelling personal accounts.
An accessible, clear guide on maintaining realistic relationship goals.Pub Date: May 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73495-637-5
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Tree of Life Books
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
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