A dynamic approach to focusing, connecting, and developing mutual understanding.
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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
