An intelligent, insightful and highly readable guide written by a veteran therapist.
Reitman (You’re Okay But You Don’t Know It, 2012, etc.), a seasoned self-help author, offers a thoughtful, compelling and practical guide on how to create happy, lasting relationships.
As a clinical psychologist in private practice for more than 45 years, Reitman has witnessed the struggles of many couples, and he’s honed his sense of what works for men and women working through discord, miscommunication and other relationship hurdles. Reitman begins by taking a fascinating, distinctly non-nostalgic look at the roles of men and women in relationships throughout history, including an eye-opening pamphlet from a 1950s high school home economics book, in which subservience and placation were the ideal wife’s M.O. He points out that even when using idealized male and female qualities from the present day, it’s still a struggle to make relationships succeed, and the divorce rate has now risen to more than 50 percent of all marriages. The author analyzes three distinct roles that, he posits, people in relationships tend to play—the warrior, the wimp and the winner—though he’s also careful to say that no one is purely one type or another. He describes the warrior’s behavior as “typically highly egocentric and defensive in nature,” while the wimp will “capitulate, compromise, and rarely voice their real thoughts or feelings.” Winners have found “peace with themselves” and “are more forgiving and understanding of the shortcomings of others.” Reflective and self-deprecating, Reitman often uses personal, sometimes humorous stories to make a point. In addition, he describes many of his clients—anonymously, of course—and their troubled relationships as well as happier moments in which they were able to repair their crippled marriages. He emphasizes that much behavior comes from patterns developed as children reacting to unique family dynamics. Lastly, he gives readers a bounty of thoughtful problem-solving strategies, including how to recognize our destructive behaviors, set limits, trust ourselves and risk love.
An intelligent, insightful and highly readable guide written by a veteran therapist.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484074091
Page Count: 350
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2013
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
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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