An uninspired litany of workmanlike tasks to stimulate the brain.
This third installment of a series of workbooks offers ways to improve mental acuity.
Litvin (Sailor’s Psychology, 2012, etc.) has argued over the course of several books that the human brain is an impressively elastic organ, capable of considerable dysfunction as well as spectacularly efficient repair. Intellectual underperformance, he contends, is not usually the result of genetic disadvantage but rather the kind of damage done to the brain that reduces its overall operational power. More specifically, he believes a malfunctioning brain ceases to shuttle information throughout its various regions properly, essentially delivering packets of data to the wrong places. The principal culprits are complex brain cells, which can be repaired or replaced by the targeted stimulation of simple cells. According to Litvin, a psychologist, this may be accomplished by compelling the brain to process different kinds of perceptual stimuli in rapid succession. The author presents his general theory regarding brain operations in Psychoconduction (2012), and the theory underlying the exercises in particular in Litvin’s Code (2011). The exercises require the participant to translate symbols embedded in mathematical equations into different modes of perceptual expression. For example, a number can be represented by a smell (like a bar of soap) or a noise (like knocking on a table). The final volume presents the series’ most difficult equations, which neatly fall into problems of multiplication, division, and reverse division. Typical of Litvin’s other workbooks, the problems are clearly explained in plain language unencumbered by academic jargon and include helpful instructional illustrations by Martirosyan (Intermediate Brain Stimulation by Psychoconduction, 2011, etc.). This is only intended as a workbook—a catalog of mental drills—so no explanation of the psychology justifying the problems’ efficacy is presented here. The author never comments on what precisely is meant by advanced, and it remains unclear for whom the exercises are intended, though they seem to be suitable for readers in their early teens. The effectiveness of the exercises is difficult to ascertain—in none of his books does Litvin ever supply a systematically clear or scientifically substantiated account, and his claims regarding their expected results challenge credulity. The exercises themselves lack a creative element or the promise of entertainment—they are computational tasks. One is compelled to conclude that most readers will experience these drills as the performance of an educational duty.
An uninspired litany of workmanlike tasks to stimulate the brain.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4669-0152-0
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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