A loving, if not very creative, analysis of the conflicts that arise when women try to foster both relationships and personal fulfillment. Family therapists Bepko and Krestan (Too Good for Her Own Good, 1990) contend, not surprisingly, that women can have both. The authors researched the issue by surveying more than 300 women, and by following up with 45 intense personal interviews. They were ``surprised'' to find that many still believe that relationships are more important than self-expression—although one wonders why that finding startled them: The research of Carol Gilligan and others has made the dominance of relationships in women's lives a point of feminist debate for years. Besides exploring the priorities of relationships, the survey's questions also probed how women defined and shaped (or did not shape) their creative lives (Mary Catherine Bateson's Composing a Life, 1989, covers this territory more fully, with less gushing admiration for creative women). The early chapters here are best, examining the patriarchal culture that has made it rewarding for women to nurture relationships and not their individuality. On the basis of the survey, the authors group women into four types—''lovers,'' ``leaders,'' ``innovators,'' and ``artists''—depending on where their priorities lie. The authors seem to prefer women who dump their pasts in order to become poets, artists, or marginal entrepreneurs. The anecdotes about women like these who live a ``passionate life'' are compelling, and some of Bepko and Krestan's insights challenge conventional wisdom—e.g., that children are less disruptive of the creative life than marriage is. (Questionnaires, as well as profiles of the respondents, are included as appendices.) Excellent for its historical summary of the tensions that women face in choosing between the creative and the caring life, but unconvincing for its typecasting.
Pub Date: July 7, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-016805-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1993
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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IN THE NEWS
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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