Tosses a daunting challenge to educators, social workers, and policy shapers.
Harsh criticism of middle-class American culture, one pervaded by a new form of social Darwinism that places its youth at increasingly high risk for the ills long associated with disadvantaged adolescents.
Sociologist Currie (Criminology, Law, and Society/Univ. of California, Irvine; Reckoning, 1993, etc.) sees the social climate in America as being shaped by a modern market ideology that views life as a competitive scramble in which individuals must sink or swim on their own. Adolescents today, he says, bear the marks of growing up in a world dominated by a lifeboat ethic that denies mutual responsibility and assistance to the vulnerable. From 2000 to 2002, the author conducted a study of adolescents in treatment for substance abuse; here, his recorded conversations with these youths, as well as with many of his college students, provide a vivid picture of adolescent troubles. From them, Currie identifies and examines in some detail four main themes: inversion of responsibility, intolerance of transgression, rejection of nurturance, and worth seen as contingent on meeting certain narrow standards of performance. In their own words, adolescents describe their encounters with these attitudes in families, schools, and other institutions. Parents are shown as quick to discipline but slow to take responsibility, to nurture and to support. Schools, Currie declares, are prone to categorize students as “good” or “bad” and to banish the bad. He charges that treatment programs, which often offer medication as the first form of intervention, favor such harsh therapeutic techniques as shaming and humiliation. From his interviews, he concludes that the help that mattered most to youth was practical assistance that did not try to change them but helped them make changes they had already chosen. Despite his assertion that the root of the problem is cultural, in his final chapter he does offer some specific steps for better meeting the needs of troubled adolescents.
Tosses a daunting challenge to educators, social workers, and policy shapers.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-6763-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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