A sympathetic and evenhanded treatment of Harlow’s life and work—and an absorbing look at 19th- and 20th-century notions of...
Pulitzer-winning science journalist Blum (Journalism/Univ. of Wisconsin; Sex on the Brain, 1997, etc.) offers a biography of an innovative, controversial psychologist.
Harry Harlow (1905–81) was a deeply troubled man who struggled his whole life with human relationships; yet, in his primate laboratory at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he worked for 44 years, he discovered how love works. Harlow was one of the psychology pioneers in “attachment theory,” the then-revolutionary idea that a close physical relationship between mother and infant was essential to a child’s development. Social skills and adaptability were learned in large part from this important first human relationship. Harlow experimented with numerous variations of “motherhood,” depriving baby monkeys of mothers altogether, substituting warm and cold “cloth moms,” and examining ways in which young monkeys attempted to compensate for their mothers’ absence. Defying long-held views that coddling babies or being over-responsive to their needs would spoil their chances of survival, Harlow showed that those who received the most love often performed best in later life. In the 1960s, he turned his attention to its antithesis—loneliness and depression, work that held new meaning for him as he grieved the premature death from cancer of his beloved wife Peggy. No sooner did Harlow’s work make him famous, however, than his ideas got him into trouble with the emerging women’s movement. His conviction that mothers had a singular capacity as child-rearers flew in the face of a growing feminist consciousness that sought a larger role for women in society. Harlow, a caustic W.C. Fields type with a fondness for drink, only worsened his situation by boldly asserting that biological differences between men and women were immutable and, when angered, flashing misogynistic sentiments in print and at psychology conferences. Toward the end of his life, even many old friends and colleagues chose to avoid him.
A sympathetic and evenhanded treatment of Harlow’s life and work—and an absorbing look at 19th- and 20th-century notions of child psychology.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7382-0278-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Perseus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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