Constructive counsel for future counselors that should be part of every law student’s brief.
A practical primer for students entering the intimidating first year of law school.
With intimacy and vulnerability, Glimp, an accomplished graduate of Columbia Law School, shares not only her own experiences—from receiving her acceptance letter and her first failed test to taking the bar with a cracked tooth in hand—but also her practices of gratitude, mindfulness, and meditation to help “1Ls” succeed. These tools go beyond simple insights into the Socratic method or exam strategies, though those are here, too. The author provides tips for developing a Super PAC (or “Personal Affirmation Committee”) of family members, friends, upperclassmen, and mentors to help maximize support and make important connections that will serve future lawyers well past their first year in school. Glimp identifies common pitfalls like negatively comparing oneself to peers, the mediocrity of complacency, and the myth of multitasking. She details specific language and tactics that POCs and other marginalized individuals can use to combat implicit bias, microaggressions, and systemic discrimination, and she suggests pragmatic ways to confront inequality and to self-advocate. Each chapter includes a “Solo Sidebar” with questions that encourage self-examination (“What excites you the most about starting law school?”) along with mindfulness exercises that focus on stretching, breathing, and other self-soothing techniques. A resource on law school that emphasizes gratitude and touts the importance of self-care as much as academic fastidiousness might seem a little New Age-y at first, but its straightforward practicality and easy-to-implement advice keep things grounded. Glimp never sugarcoats how difficult law school can be and shares accessible strategies to deal with fear and anxiety. The advice on how to “show up and shine” often focuses on basic (and easy to neglect) areas like diet, exercise, and good sleep hygiene. The text is well supported by citations and provides recommendations for further reading. Though this guide is a resource aimed at first-year law students, there is much here that would be a boon for anyone entering an intensive academic program.
Constructive counsel for future counselors that should be part of every law student’s brief.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781646035236
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Pact Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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