Moving personal memoir melded with a realistic look at the widespread ramifications of drinking during pregnancy.
A Canadian journalist’s experience raising an adoptive daughter with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) leads to an exploration of the disorder and a consciousness-raising campaign.
Buxton, co-founder with her husband, Brian Philcox, of FASworld, a Canadian organization that promotes awareness of FAS around the world, had no idea that her daughter Colette, adopted at age three, had been permanently brain-damaged by prenatal alcohol. Hers is a harrowing account of coping with a child who was violent, lied, stole and had major learning problems. Buxton’s pleas for help from professionals went unheeded, and by the time the uncontrollable Colette was 17, she had been in and out of a residential treatment center and was a crack addict living on the streets of Toronto. Soon after, she became pregnant twice. Seeing a television program on FAS in 1997 was the a-ha! moment for Buxton, who eventually discovered the work of Ann Streissguth, a psychologist specializing in FAS. Through her Web site, Buxton is now in touch with many people afflicted by FAS, and several of her chapters tell the stories of other adoptive parents’ experiences, of adult survivors of FAS, and of mothers who gave birth to FAS babies. While most of the accounts are pain-filled, Buxton includes a few success stories from parents proud of the achievements of their FAS children. What those parents have in common, Buxton finds, are acceptance, reduced expectations, commitment, knowledge, creativity, a positive outlook and “a whopping sense of humor.” While positive stories may offer encouragement and ideas to those trying to raise FAS children, this is not primarily a hands-on guidebook for parents; Buxton’s aim is to make the syndrome more widely understood by all who work with children—pediatricians, teachers and social workers, police, judges and probation officers. The bibliography, however, does recommend several parenting guides, helpful newsletters and Web sites.
Moving personal memoir melded with a realistic look at the widespread ramifications of drinking during pregnancy.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1550-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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