A potent, incisive reconsideration of a fundamental human behavior.
A pertinent study of the possibilities for reconceiving addictive behaviors.
In this provocative book, Dakwar, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia, draws on his extensive clinical and research experience to offer what he calls “a work of imagination” that reframes addiction as a complex and universal form of meaning-making. What distinguishes addicts from the “normal,” he argues, is simply a more extreme reliance on finding comfort in a ritualized symbolic world. Such worlds are made up of stories, and understanding the suffering that informs the patterns of anyone’s storytelling can be liberating. In several insightful case studies, the author introduces patients with representative problems related to addictive behavior and sets forth the possibilities he envisions for therapeutic interventions. His own wide-ranging commentary places these personal struggles in relation to canonical works of philosophical and imaginative literature—such figures as Plato, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer appear throughout. Dakwar also carefully notes how the “trance of Western culture” can blind us to disabling prejudices and perpetuate harm. A balance of reverence and irreverence toward past understandings of addiction is, in fact, characteristic of the book, which frames itself, with some credibility, as breaking new ground in understanding healing possibilities. Though the author can seem self-indulgent in his striving for poetic expressiveness, he ultimately offers a compelling overview of a modern crisis along with plausible suggestions for possible avenues of mitigation. Dakwar establishes interesting links between addiction and “systems that perpetuate suffering, such as the war on drugs, social iniquities, and the correctional-industrial complex.” Finally, the author is persuasive in his suggestion that “there is a great deal that addiction can teach us about the many ways we strive for a better world, while at the same time destroying one another, the earth, and ourselves.”
A potent, incisive reconsideration of a fundamental human behavior.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9780063340480
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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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IN THE NEWS
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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