A thoughtful, wise, empathetic book that has the capacity to save lives.
An actor and a psychologist examine the stressors in the lives of Black males, suggesting ways for improved self-care.
Just as Vance was beginning to enjoy success as an actor, his father, long traumatized by the feeling of abandonment in childhood, committed suicide. The event set him on a yearslong voyage of self-examination. “I loved my father deeply,” Vance writes, “but I hardly knew him”—a common feeling among Black men, who, writes Smith, “live with the contradiction of being highly scrutinized and invisible at the same time. They know that when they are in non-Black spaces, they are being watched, sometimes with admiration, sometimes with envy, often with fear.” Wrestling with that contradiction is a high-wire act for many, especially for those who become visible through fame, whether as an actor, athlete, politician, or business leader. “They try,” Smith adds, “to believe that it’s not painful or messy to know that their special status is fragile…or that if they are considered special, it means so many who look like them are not.” The resulting denial, she holds, is itself a stressor. Addressing those sources of friction requires men to seek help, which is sometimes difficult to do, contradicting cultural ideals of stoicism. Vance writes of the difficulty of seeking therapy—and then of the many benefits that resulted. Smith encourages constant alertness to the condition of those around you. “Get in other folks’ business,” she counsels, particularly, as both she and Vance write, when there is any hint of suicidal ideation or behavior. In a book whose lessons extend to readers of any background, the authors emphasize the necessity of self-care and the awareness that with all of life’s tragedies, “no circumstance is without meaning” and “no experience is wasted.”
A thoughtful, wise, empathetic book that has the capacity to save lives.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781538725139
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Balance/Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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
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Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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