When Sheehan (This Running Life, 1980, etc.) was diagnosed with inoperable cancer, he turned his physician's eye and writer's ear to the subject of his own mortality, producing this posthumous volume. Dr. Johnson once observed that knowing that death is imminent has a wonderful way of focusing the mind. Dr. Sheehan was never someone who had trouble focusing in his writing. One of the great apostles of running, he wrotes columns and books that were always wonderfully lucid explorations of the balance between body, mind, and spirit. Not surprisingly, this volume, tracing his final journey toward death from prostate cancer, is more of the same, only more intense. The book, he says in the introduction, really has three subjects: It's ``about what dying actually means to a person undergoing it . . . a communion with others experiencing dying. And . . . an evaluation of my life.'' The first essay clearly began as a rumination on turning 70, but when Sheehan received the diagnosis of his cancer, it was transmuted into a very different story. And an inspiring story it is. Sheehan is completely frank about the indignities of fatal illness—pain and painkillers, loss of appetite and unappetizing food, constant fatigue and a sudden loss of powers. He is also mercilessly honest in self-evaluation. Finally, he draws on a lifetime of reading and writing to produce a luminous examination of those larger questions that we don't really confront until we must. From Epictetus to William James, Unamuno to Thornton Wilder, Sheehan has a knack for finding the right thought and thinker. In 1993, he died at peace with himself and his life, and left behind this last glowing gift. Almost unbearably moving at times, a must-read book for anyone facing severe illness or loss.
Pub Date: April 4, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44843-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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
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