An anguished account of the unhappy life of Terry McGovern, by a father still struggling to come to terms with it. Former senator McGovern learned in December 1994 that his 45-year-old daughter had frozen to death in a snowbank in Madison, Wisc., after a night of heavy drinking. The present work is his attempt to understand and to explain to himself and the world how this came to be. Terry, the middle of the McGoverns' five children, struggled with alcoholism and depression most of her life. Her adolescent years read like a parent's nightmare: an abortion, drugs, a suicide attempt, and an arrest for marijuana possession that threatened to send her to prison for five years and to end her father's political career. Both were averted, but soon afterward Terry was in the locked ward of a psychiatric center, where she was being treated for depression. McGovern includes excerpts from journals Terry kept over the years that reveal her drinking habits and her troubled state of mind. Except for an eight-year period of sobriety in her 30s, when she gave birth to two daughters, Terry's life is a saga of treatment programs, hospitalizations, and rehab centers—all invariably followed by relapses. McGovern quotes from stark police and detox center reports to depict Terry's degradation in her final months. This is not pretty stuff. Throughout, Terry is portrayed as the beleaguered victim, struggling against the double blow that fate has dealt her: a genetic vulnerability to alcohol addiction from her father's side of the family tree and to depression from her mother's. Although McGovern the politician cannot resist the occasional self-serving paragraph, and McGovern the parent tries too hard to convince us of his daughter's spirituality and nobility of character, his basic message that alcoholism and mental illness create a vicious circle of misery comes through loud and clear. (8 pages of b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44797-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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