If you embrace the notion that humankind ought to embrace more kindness, “a natural outcome of integration,” then this is...
A clinical professor of psychology serves up the soft, squishy side of neuroscience.
If you are a hard-drilling student of brain science, the mind is the ghost in the machine, some matter for Cartesian pondering, with a healthy dose of the uncertainty principle thrown in for good measure: for how can the thing doing the measuring be measured itself? Siegel (Psychiatry/UCLA School of Medicine; Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain, 2014, etc.) is not that steely scholar. Instead, this treatise on the mind is a sometimes-elegant (“skull and skin are not limiting boundaries of energy and information flow”) but often seemingly nonrigorous look at what Woody Allen called his second favorite organ. Mind, by Siegel’s account, is indeed energy and information flow; it is embodied, inasmuch as it exists inside the brain, but it is also disembodied, inasmuch as it extends beyond the individual. Brain activity is energy flow, but somehow that energy flow yields a world of mental representations, of subjective mental experience. “Subjective” is a key word in the author’s account, for, as he writes, he has long sought a way “to connect empirical insights with emotional knowledge.” This interest in the emotional, in the “inner view of mental life,” is largely what separates Siegel from the likes of Antonio Damasio, but allowing for off-putting neologisms such as “MWe”—shorthand for “our integrated identity, the linkage of a differentiated me with a differentiated we”—it is a side that has not received enough scholarly attention. These emotional aspects, manifested in matters such as grief, would seem to be real enough, though much neuroscience questions the “reality” of subjective experience; Siegel nods to that by noting, “we can honor the universal reality that perception is a constructed skill.” In other words, it’s more Pema Chodron than Petri dish.
If you embrace the notion that humankind ought to embrace more kindness, “a natural outcome of integration,” then this is your book.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-71053-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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