An illuminating account of how a great thinker with insatiable curiosity overcame a difficult childhood through his love of...
A titan in his field recounts professional and personal achievements.
Growing up impoverished in a hardscrabble Boston suburb, Aronson never dreamed that one day he would teach at Harvard, let alone be considered one of the preeminent psychologists of the 20th century. The son of a Russian émigré who lost everything in the Depression, the author describes himself as a “painfully shy” and bullied boy always compared unfavorably to his star sibling, Jason. His brother nurtured him, however, imparting many valuable life lessons and insisting that he attend college despite financial hardship and poor grades. In perhaps his first social-learning experiment, Aronson decided to act “as if” he were outgoing and relaxed his first semester at Brandeis. This strategy was effective, and with newfound popularity came increased confidence. Always interested in the basis of others’ beliefs, allegiances and opinions, he selected social psychologist Leon Festinger—famous for his theory of cognitive dissonance—as his mentor, and then designed an experiment that emphasized self-concept, transforming the focus of this field of study. During the next five decades, Aronson remained at the center of dynamic developments in the field. This warm, humble and brilliant man takes pride as much in being a successful teacher, husband, father and friend as in his academic accomplishments. He peppers the narrative with amusing anecdotes about luminaries and colleagues such as Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (now Ram Dass), who asked for his help with the design of their LSD experiments. A humanist who led encounter groups in the ’70s and created the jigsaw classroom to address discrimination in the era of enforced school desegregation in Texas, the author demonstrates dramatically the real-world impact of research. His descriptions of experimental design and theory are thorough yet accessible to the average reader, but it is his profound insights, observations and compassion that make this a fascinating read.
An illuminating account of how a great thinker with insatiable curiosity overcame a difficult childhood through his love of social science.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-465-01833-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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