How to connect with others—and why it’s important.
Brodkin is a professor of psychiatry and founder and director of the Adult Autism Spectrum Program at Penn Medicine, and Pallathra is a researcher and therapist currently pursuing her doctorate in clinical psychology. In this collaboration, the authors write that “to be aware of our own state of mind and body while also tuning in and connecting” with other people is “perhaps the most needed, and most neglected, human capacity.” There is a vital need to pay attention, to be seen and heard without distraction, and to thwart the countless misunderstandings that can occur every day. The authors tap into a wide range of disciplines—among them, neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, music, literature, and mindfulness—to bolster their argument about the importance of forming the “genuine, lasting connections” that are so often “elusive.” They write with a passionate, encouraging, come-and-join-me quality, showing how we can find attunement through the exercise of its basic components: relaxed awareness, a calm and attentive focus on your body, environment, and company; listening, being observant to the other person and your reactions; understanding, the recognition and appreciation of another’s point of view and intentions; and mutual responsiveness, maintaining connection through the vagaries of conversation. The authors wisely express the complexity and at times counterintuitive nature of these components—the balancing act between calmness and tight focus, listening to yourself and another person at the same time, expressing both emotional and cognitive empathy—but they provide examples and exercises to enable their use. The exercises, actual physical actions that promote synchronicity and proportional response, don’t lend themselves to the authors’ verbal detailing, but they direct readers to their website for video demonstrations. Though occasionally repetitive, the text will help readers achieve a more centered state of mind: “what T.S. Eliot called ‘the still point in a turning world.’ ”
A dynamic approach to focusing, connecting, and developing mutual understanding.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5417-7401-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
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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
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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