An important book by a refreshingly candid author who shares his vast knowledge in the interests of the needy.
Psychiatrist Torrey (The Insanity Offense: How America's Failure to Treat the Seriously Mentally Ill Endangers Its Citizens, 2008, etc.) returns to the battleground of reform with another book about the inability of government agencies and private institutions to care well for the severely mentally ill.
The author names individuals who, in his opinion, are responsible for the disaster of mental health care across the United States. Here, Torrey focuses more on the historical reasons for the sad situation, with special emphasis on the family of President John F. Kennedy. Since Kennedy's sister Rosemary was developmentally disabled and increasingly unstable as she aged, the new president had a high awareness of hidden mental illness problems. But his push for federal mental illness legislation, however well-intended, dismantled the state-based mental hospital system without sensible alternatives in place. As a result, Torrey explains, what became known as "deinstitutionalization" placed tens of thousands of severely mentally ill patients in communities entirely unprepared to care for them. Torrey excoriates the leadership at the National Institute for Mental Health for their inability to anticipate the disaster and subsequent failure to admit their mistakes and take corrective action. After devoting about two-thirds of the text to the historical record, Torrey offers a chapter titled "Dimensions of the Present Disaster, 2000-2013,” in which he lucidly explains how community jails and state prisons have become the new centers for warehousing severely mentally ill individuals. The final chapter is filled with sensible recommendations that could be funded by current misguided expenditures that Torrey estimates at about $140 billion annually. The author makes clear that the solutions will require not only vast funding, but also a long-term commitment by trained caregivers, plus family members who insist that their mentally ill relatives be committed to institutions when dangerous to themselves and innocent bystanders.
An important book by a refreshingly candid author who shares his vast knowledge in the interests of the needy.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-19-998871-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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