New Age border-crossings that blur more than clarify where physics and the dreaming psyche meet. As in The Eagle Quest (1991), physicist Wolf extends Jung's idea of synchronicity to explain the connection between an individual's dream and the ``dreaming universe.'' He finds Freudian dream theory analogous to, and as limited as, Newtonian physics- -it's no surprise that Jung in turn is praised as being analogous to Niels Bohr, ``the father/mother of quantum physics.'' Reverting to ideas explored in Parallel Universes (1989), Wolf considers the ``essential mystery'' at the heart of quantum mechanics, using a variety of coyly autobiographical anecdotes to suggest that the dreaming brain, by entering the unconscious mind, is experiencing synchronicity. It's this kind of sloppy mixture of anecdotal and scientific material that keeps New Age thought on the fringe. It doesn't get any better when Wolf throws in superficial chapters on ancient views of dreams, the research of neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet, and Crick and Mitchison's theory that ``we dream in order to reduce faults by feeding in certain `unlearning' inputs that poisoned the unwanted modes.'' In each, the analogies are all simplistic and reductive. Wolf claims that dreams are ``an altered state of conscious awareness,'' equivalent to a ``quantum mechanics of dreaming.'' But his thinking is confused; sometimes he uses quantum physics as a model or a metaphor to understand dreams, but ultimately he wants to posit a world in which there is no outer world of space and time separated from the inner world of mental activity, but only a third ``imaginal realm...of the big dreamer.'' Subjectively anecdotal, dilettantish wish-fulfillment.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-74946-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The prolific Coles, Harvard's noted social ethicist and author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning five-volume Children of Crisis, muddies the ethical waters conceptually in this rather loosely organized guide on raising a child to be a moral person. Linking morality to general character development, to ``goodness,'' rather than to specific issues of ethical attitudes and behavior, Coles meanders from topic to topic, discussing such matters as the process by which young people develop a worldview and manners, how career choices emerge, the nature of sociability in the young, and the origins of spirituality. Coles has a penchant for rhetorical overdrive, resulting in too many run-on sentences (one tops out at 138 words). Readers may feel that he quotes too liberally from his mentor, Anna Freud, and that he relies too frequently on excerpts from transcripts of group discussions he has held with parents, adolescents, and children. Finally, Coles sometimes states as a seemingly fresh perception concepts that have been in circulation for years, such as the idea that children, particularly adolescents, need and hunger for moral values and limits, that they often feel alienated or lost without such values, and that parents and teachers best impart these values through the day-to-day manifestations of empathy, kindness, and similar forms of sensitivity to others rather than through preaching or nagging. To be sure, Coles does glean some telling comments from young people. An adolescent girl, fed up with her parents' obsessive fretting about her possible romantic and sexual entanglements with boys, says shrewdly, ``I wish my parents would stop turning me into one more reason not to worry about themselves.'' In general, however, Coles has considered the issues raised in this book more profitably in a host of earlier works, particularly The Moral Life of Children (1985) and The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (1988). He has little to add here. (First printing of 75,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-44811-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing and informative look at the hidden long-term depression that constricts or undermines the relationships of many American men. Real, a family therapist and teacher at the Cambridge (Mass.) Family Institute, contends that most male depression is undiagnosed because it is veiled by addictive and compulsive behavior using such varied ``drugs'' as alcohol, work, violence, and sex. Its key symptom is ``relational immaturity,'' an inability or unwillingness to truly confide in and be vulnerable before a partner or child. Real traces this problem in part to the gender-polarized socialization of American children. From an early age, boys are encouraged to seek esteem through ``hierarchical competition'' while being discouraged from expressing feelings and bonding with others. In addition, boys sometimes ``carry'' the depression suffered by their fathers and expressed through emotional abuse or neglect. Much of Real's argument has been made by other clinical and popular psychologists, but he states his case particularly vividly, drawing richly on his own family history, his clinical practice, myth and legend, film and fiction. He also offers advice and case studies on how the therapist might resolve depression by helping patients overcome their fear of intimacy and redefine their notion of success. He also recounts active therapeutic interventions to stop the kind of toxic family dynamics that a husband's depression can help generate. On the downside, Real overfocuses on the father-son relationship; there is too little here on how depressed or narcissistic mothers may contribute to long-term male depression, much less on how siblings or societal factors may do so. Stylistically, it is somewhat marred by repetition, and the occasional use of a clumsy phrase (``rageaholism'') or hyperbolic generalization, such as a reference to ``the state of alienation we call manhood.'' Fortunately, such lapses are a minor part of what otherwise is an important and rewarding work. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-83102-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
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