Amusing and heartening.
A lively, anecdotal examination of the mystifying and treacherous landscape of dating and love.
New York Times “Modern Love” columnist Jones states that he doesn't consider himself an expert in the dating and marriage game, and the book will disappoint those seeking definitive advice for dating, finding true love or making relationships work. Instead, the author breaks down the wisdom he has garnered from reviewing and editing 50,000 (and counting) readers' love stories and laments. Although he offers no hard and fast rules or absolutes, Jones makes several observations about the state of modern romantic relationships and what he sees as permanent changes to the dating landscape, filed under irreverent chapter subheadings like "Destiny: So What's Wrong With You?" and "Trust: Avoid Everybody." The author demonstrates how the metrics of one particular dating website focused his attention on several appropriate candidates, but not with his wife, to whom he has been married for more than 10 years. He explains this is due to the fact that when users intensify their focus—as online dating sites encourage their members to do—they tend to lose their peripheral vision, which involves serendipity, the possibility of compromise and, if you believe in it, destiny. Another enlightening section reveals how modern social mores and technology have created new ways of connecting without genuine communication—e.g., booty-texting and hooking up; emailing, e-chatting, blogging, Tweeting and Skyping. Jones pointedly labels this new frontier of the search for love the "Soul Mate In A Box.” The author does not provide reassurance to the baffled, frustrated and lovelorn; he notes that "the case with almost anyone who's feeling unwanted and hopeless is they simply haven't met the right person.” Unfortunately, “some people never do."
Amusing and heartening.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-221116-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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