Emotionally taxing but courageous; especially appropriate for abused spouses and the professionals who council them.
A deeply disturbing debut memoir about physical intimidation and emotional abuse that tears a family apart.
The author and her husband, Charles Mask, met while both were in a 12-step program for their alcohol addiction. They had, she thought, a good marriage, although Charles occasionally displayed signs of narcissistic domination. Still, she concentrated on home and hearth, delighting in caring for their three children, Jade, Zach, and Leonard. But the relationship deteriorated as Charles undermined her authority with Jade and became more frequently verbally abusive and accusatory. Jade was the first to become blatantly hostile toward her mother; ultimately, the others followed her lead. After years of legal battles and volumes of testimony, Charles was awarded complete custody of the children. And, as Mask carefully details, he convinced them that she was their enemy. Mask’s children have remained alienated from her for more than 13 years, though they all have reached adulthood. Mask admits that during the tumultuous six years of fighting for custody, she became psychologically fragile, fell off the wagon more than once, and entered a rehabilitation facility for several months. But she also offers ample evidence of the love she and the children once shared—photographs, notes written by one child or another, etc. In large measure, this oversized volume is a plea to her children to remember the good years, to reach beyond what professionals call the dynamic of “Parental Alienation Syndrome.” It’s also a passionate call to reform the child custody system. The stunner in this story is the extent to which the author was ill-served by her attorney, the justice system, and the mental health professionals who were supposed to help. Copies of legal documents and psychological evaluations display marked favoritism toward Mask’s husband. Mask bolsters her argument with excerpts from numerous accredited studies. The rage and pain that pour from every page is certainly understandable, although it makes for difficult reading. And a running heavy focus on her religious convictions threatens to distract readers from a sociologically valuable work.
Emotionally taxing but courageous; especially appropriate for abused spouses and the professionals who council them.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-973608-81-3
Page Count: 702
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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