An intelligent though sometimes dense examination of moral courage and its consequences.
Press (Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict That Divided America, 2006) returns with a disquisition on conscience, “about the mystery of what impels people to…stop, say no, resist.”
The author builds his account on the foundation of social psychology and examines the stories of several people from a variety of times, cultures and situations. He begins—where else?—with the Nazis in Poland, 1942, when the German Order Police committed a mass execution of Jews, but about a dozen soldiers refused to participate. Press then moves to Paul Grüninger, a Swiss policeman who in 1938 admitted into the country a number of Jewish refugees—ignoring official policy. Next the author looks at a Serb soldier who saved a number of Croats targeted for ethnic cleansing in 1991. Another case was an Israeli soldier who defied policy in an operation against the Palestinians. Press’ final example is Leyla Wydler, a financial advisor employed by the Stanford Group Company in 2000 who reported to the SEC her company’s gross deceptions. Throughout, Press notes the consequences of his principals’ actions: ostracism, firing, psychological, social and financial losses. Interviewing those still living, he learns some surprising things. Not all are intellectuals, or even had rational reasons for behaving as they did (to some, it just didn’t feel right); not all had religious or even moral reasons for their behavior. Some attribute their decision to family history or to simply looking in the mirror; none had regrets. Press believes that saying no is always possible, never easy and that the outcome is surely never certain. To buttress his analysis, he includes allusions to philosophers, psychologists and even relevant films—e.g., Silkwood.
An intelligent though sometimes dense examination of moral courage and its consequences.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-14342-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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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