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
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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