Neither wholly original (the authors cite Wendy Kaminer) nor wholly surprising, yet certain to spark reflection and...
A gauntlet-throwing assessment of the culture of therapy.
Sommers has made a career out of slaying sacred cows, trashing second-wave feminism, and arguing that boys get the short end of the stick in American schools and society (Who Stole Feminism? 1994; The War Against Boys, 2000). Part of her and Satel’s take now on the culture of therapy is historical. If “therapism”—a phrase the authors borrow from British satirist Fay Weldon—gained ascendancy in the age of tell-all talk shows, it still isn’t wholly new, with roots lying in the work of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. But the heart of Sommers and Satel’s approach is a scathing assessment of contemporary life. The authors scrutinize everything from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to grief counseling. Americans, they claim, now cast everything in therapeutic terms, unwilling even to describe serial murderers as evil, but chalking up their heinous deeds to a generic version of “battered-child syndrome.” Addicts avoid personal responsibility for drinking or shooting up by characterizing addiction as a disease. Sommers and Satel are especially concerned about therapy’s effects on children. Indeed, their examples of its invasion of childhood can be breathtaking: that Girl Scouts can now earn a “Stress Less” badge by burning aromatic candles and practicing meditative breathing, or that numerous schools have discouraged dodgeball because throwing a ball at a child might make him feel besieged. Sommers and Satel contend that this pandering to children’s feelings “pathologizes healthy young people” and is good neither for kids nor society. The authors, though, are long on critique and short on suggestions for change: they advocate reticence instead of wholesale openness and sharing, and urge parents to demand more homework—and the return of dodgeball. But readers are likely to wish for a chapter or two of more concrete proposals.
Neither wholly original (the authors cite Wendy Kaminer) nor wholly surprising, yet certain to spark reflection and conversation.Pub Date: April 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-30443-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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
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