by Chris M. Meadows ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 8, 2013
An enlightening read for anyone who wants to learn more about joy and related emotions.
In this debut nonfiction work, an academic, clinical psychologist, and psychotherapist reviews the scholarship on joy and attempts to define what it is and how it comes about.
Meadows studied the phenomenon of joy in depth while teaching at Nashville, Tennessee–based Vanderbilt University, where he gathered subjective accounts of joyful experiences from 300 students. Joy, he writes, is “one of the most over-used and under-valued words in the English language.” A “kind of happiness industry has developed,” he says, causing a flood of self-help books and use of “joy” as a marketing buzzword. Psychologists and other scholars have paid far more attention to negative emotions, he notes; nevertheless, positive ones, including joy, have come in for their share of scrutiny, and he covers a lot of ground reviewing literature in the field, starting with Aristotle and working his way through contemporary studies. Joy is not just a feel-good emotion, he writes, but an important mental armament that “serves crucial evolutionary functions,” helping to ensure that infants receive proper care and spurring couples to reproduce, for example. Meadows compares and contrasts it with other, similar emotions, such as happiness, ecstasy, pleasure, transcendence, and even the manic phases of bipolar disorder. Despite its importance, though, joy “comes to a person on its own schedule,” unbidden, Meadows notes, and it’s as fruitless to pursue it—although one may better accommodate it by using philosophy, religion, one’s work, and other channels. Overall, Meadows has written a fascinating book that’s rich in scholarship and detail yet also accessible to general readers. He writes clearly and backs up his work with abundant, intelligently analyzed sources. However, he does fall prey to occasional glitches, such as writing “pedals” instead of “petals” and placing a contemporary scholar just two and a half centuries after Aristotle. That said, he makes a solid case for the evolutionary and emotional importance of joy—providing not only a description of it, but also hints as to how one might approach it, if not necessarily attain it.
An enlightening read for anyone who wants to learn more about joy and related emotions.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-415-84123-8
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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...
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
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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