A Boston Globe reporter's on-the-spot account of the media's—and the public's—rush to judgment when Harvard psychiatrist Margaret Bean-Bayog was suspected of seducing a young male patient and driving him to suicide. A preface explains that this first-person narrative was written by Gary, the younger Chafetz, who covered the story for the Globe, while Morris, his psychiatrist father, served as consultant and reviewer. Assigned to the story under enormous deadline pressures, Chafetz was initially certain of Bean-Bayog's guilt. With time to study the case more carefully, he developed doubts and came to believe that the allegations against her could not be proved in court. Whether his assessment is accurate cannot be known, for Bean-Bayog avoided a hearing before the state medical board by resigning her medical license, and she made an out-of-court settlement in the malpractice suit brought by the patient's family. Chafetz criticizes the interpretation of Bean- Bayog's case notes made by the plaintiff's lawyer, reviews various other documents, interviews the patient's sister and some of the lawyers involved, and gives cursory attention to the issues of psychiatric practice raised by the case. Bean-Bayog granted him a number of interviews, and these are mostly reported as question-and-answer sessions in separate chapters rather than being woven into the narrative. Letting Bean-Bayog explain herself in her own words presents her as the victim in the case, but ultimately doubts about her professionalism remain. An epilogue containing some irrelevant and unflattering material about the patient's family and a compassionate glimpse of Bean- Bayog attempting to get on with her life reveals clearly where Chafetz's sympathies lie. Largely superficial reporting that has the feeling of a pastiche hastily assembled to meet a deadline. (For a more serious examination of the case, see McNamara: Breakdown, below.)
Pub Date: April 13, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-59558-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf