Beyond the specifics about young widowers, the book offers broader insights on loss, grief, and support groups.
The development of a support group provides a lifeline for seven young widowers.
Rosenstein (Medicine and Psychiatry/Univ. of North Carolina) and Yopp (Psychiatry/Univ. of North Carolina) both saw a need for a resource where there was none. Though they had worked primarily with those facing the end of their lives, they came to recognize how those deaths cast others adrift and that widower fathers of young children felt particularly helpless. Not only were they often the parent who had been less involved in the daily nurturing of the children, but men were less likely than women to seek support from anyone, including others in a similar situation. So the authors decided to start a group called the Single Fathers Due to Cancer Program. “None of the fathers had ever pictured himself as a ‘support group kind of guy,’ ” they acknowledge. “Of course, none had imagined being widowed at such a young age with children to raise, a home to manage, and lives to restore.” Each of them had decided to come primarily because of their children, to do whatever they could to help them adjust, but the lives they had to restore were their own; if they couldn’t work their way through this, they wouldn’t be able to help their children. In sharing their grief, they learned that what made them feel so bad about themselves—namely, feeling like the wrong parent had died—was common among them. They began to realize that being a perfect father was an unattainable goal but that each had it within him to be “good enough.” They also learned that though “fathers and their children had each lost the same person, they were grieving different relationships and in different ways. Their grief trajectories did not always converge or progress at the same speed.” Ultimately, they learned how to help others, with a film, a website, and this book among the resources that this initiative has generated.
Beyond the specifics about young widowers, the book offers broader insights on loss, grief, and support groups.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-064956-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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