A vivid, offbeat, and thought-provoking look at ways of dealing with the stresses of life.
A self-help book that taps into the wisdom of animals in an effort to improve readers’ emotional health and leadership skills.
“One of the casualties of a busy and technological modern life,” writes leadership coach Anstandig in this heavily autobiographical work, “is that we have lost our sensitivity to pressure as a central signal system for taking care of our needs.” One of her book’s many lessons details how she learned from the various animals in her life how to deal with these pressures and become “a pure and free version of me.” She relates many stories of having been, as she puts it, “raised by wolves,” referring to her childhood dog companions. Her narration of her deep emotional connections with these and other creatures, including horses, undergirds a greater discussion of a concept she calls “Natural Leadership,” which is based on “our innate signal systems as mammals and on phenomena that occur in the natural world.” There are various channels that all feed into the integrated awareness of Natural Leadership, Anstandig says, and she maintains that making an effort to truly listen to these signals give us “a more honest story about who we are.” Overall, the author’s decision to ground so much of her motivational insights in her friendships with members of other species turns out to be a compelling one, as it allows her to discuss the workings of pressure without getting distracted by the typical, everyday rationalizations that tend to stick to the subject when discussing human interactions. Her animals, she engagingly points out, insist that she meet them “where they live: in the present, in honesty, and in the body.” Her extensive passages describing these relationships—their “verve and aliveness,” as she puts it—are the high points of the book.
A vivid, offbeat, and thought-provoking look at ways of dealing with the stresses of life.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63195-693-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 1, 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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