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WILLIE

Name: WILLIE
Author: Ann Colin
ISBN: 0-670-86314-9

RAISING AND LOVING A CHILD WITH ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER

by Ann Colin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1997

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A mother's account of raising a child who threw tantrums, had sleep disturbances and speech problems, scratched and hit schoolmates, but was also loving and bright. Willie was Colin's first child. The pregnancy was reasonably uneventful, as was the birth. Although the cord was wrapped twice around the baby's neck, it seemed to cause no damage. It wasn't until Colin saw other children playing near or with each other in Willie's play schools and baby gym classes that she began to have questions about her son's aversion to noise and groups, his seemingly low level of frustration in certain situations (such as the sandbox, where he wopuld get ``really territorial''), and his occasional hyperkinetic behavior. A tortured year in a preschool where the head teacher finally suggested that Willie might be brain-damaged sent the angry parents on a frustrating round of evaluations for their son. Finally, one sympathetic psychologist suggested that Willie might be suffering from attention deficit disorder (ADD), and the cluster of symptoms seemed to fit Willie perfectly. The next year in a new preschool was only slightly more successful, as Ritalin and Dexedrine, the medications commonly prescribed for ADD, seemed only to aggravate Willie's behavioral problems. But weekly sessions of play therapy and speech therapy, plus the prospect of a splendid new school geared to working with children with ADD, launched Willie optimistically into his fifth year. Colin, a former features editor at McCall's, offers a careful explanation of what ADD is believed to be and touches on the problem of the increasing frequency with which an ADD diagnosis and medication are used to bring disruptive children under control in school. This tale of the discrimination, rejection, and misunderstanding that Willie faced is redeemed by a portrait of parents who persisted until they found the right slot for their son. (Author tour)

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-670-86314-9

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY

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MASTERY

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...

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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

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY | SELF-HELP

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAWS OF HUMAN NATURE
by Robert Greene

- BOOK REVIEW
THE 48 LAWS OF POWER
by Robert Greene

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...

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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.