Notwithstanding a few cookie-cutter guidelines for wise decision-making, works best as a provocation of wisdom in the...
A diverting and quirky guide to the decision-making process, containing a number of personal diatribes on received wisdom.
Romm claims that his book will make you wise. Considering that even Socrates felt it impossible to imbue others with wisdom, this is certainly an ambitious task. The author is at his provocative best when, like Socrates, he serves as a gadfly, stinging us into reexamining thoughtless assumptions. A cerebral type who passed the Ph.D.-qualifying exam in mathematics and has obtained a law degree as well, Romm takes on politics, law, economics and philosophy—as well as theology, life sciences, the scientific method and Einstein's theory of relativity. Often, however, he does not answer his own questions. In the section "Is Smarter Better?," rather than addressing the relative merits of intelligence over stupidity, he launches an attack on so-called "intelligence tests," claiming that they focus too pointedly on speed ("a highly overrated asset"). Likewise, after answering "yes" to the question "Do we have the best legal system in the world?" (without qualifying the statement), Romm devolves into a heavy critique of the criminal justice system. Opposing attorneys, with the permission of judges, he claims, "do everything they can to confuse and bamboozle" juries, rather than helping them do what they ought to: reach a just decision. Still, in "Does it pay to insure?," his critique of the insurance industry is right on target: "Few, if any, businesses have been as profitable as insurance...[it's] a losing investment that appeals particularly to risk-averse people, who constitute the majority of society." These contrarian arguments are supposed to prepare the reader's mind for the principle section of the book, "the key to wisdom"—which ends up a disappointment, especially coming from such a stimulating thinker. Equally frustrating, Romm offers a "Twelve Step Process" for reaching good decisions that includes such obvious measures as keeping an open mind, considering all alternatives, gathering relevant facts, and ranking priorities. The book closes with an appendix that contains two scholarly—but not uninteresting—essays on physics ("Dark Matter as Tachyons") and law ("Pure Risk Theory"). Curiously, though, they have scant relationship to the rest of the book and seem included merely as a means of having them published.
Notwithstanding a few cookie-cutter guidelines for wise decision-making, works best as a provocation of wisdom in the Socratic tradition, a challenge to conventional thinking.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4134-5104-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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