A compassionate and eye-opening approach to healing mentally and emotionally wounded soldiers.
A revolutionary look at methods to treat veterans in distress.
Alpern (Divorce: Rights of Passage, 2000) draws on decades of experience dealing with combat soldiers returning to civilian life in order to distill some essential lessons in his plainspoken book. He began his service as a neuropsychiatric technician in 1954 at an Army hospital in Pennsylvania and has seen firsthand the various ways—some embarrassingly simple, others complex—that many customary protocols for treating the problems of veterans ultimately fail the people they’re intended to help. The author aims his own findings and approaches at three main groups, the obvious target audience of this volume: the veterans themselves, their families and loved ones, and Alpern’s fellow mental health workers. His book breaks down the daunting intricacies of his subject into basic components: chapters dealing first with the phenomenon of veterans transitioning to civilian life, then with the common but wrongheaded ways these returning soldiers have been treated for their various psychological issues, then a chapter outlining the right ways to address these difficulties, and then two chapters elaborating on procedures that work. At every stage, Alpern, a Korean War veteran, stresses the alien nature of these ailments. “Many of the dysfunctional behaviors of our returning warriors (suicide, anger, hermitizing, the inability to relate to loved ones or common civilian tasks) are the direct result of the soul-destroying actions, fostered by extraordinary circumstances, in which a sizable number of soldiers have engaged,” he writes, adding emphatically: “There are no pills to heal such soul wounds!” His passages on the strain veterans’ families face are at times heartbreaking (wives describe feeling as though they haven’t regained their husbands but rather acquired an additional—and very troubled—child). The core of the author’s approach is in retrospect startlingly apparent: the people best qualified to help suffering veterans are other veterans. The hugely readable book’s most instructive section targets an exclusive audience: invaluable advice on how veterans can train to become mental health professionals (“Vets almost universally believe that they can be understood only by vets who have ‘been there’…Vets, through training, military ethics, and, especially, human bonding, are highly motivated to help other vets”).
A compassionate and eye-opening approach to healing mentally and emotionally wounded soldiers.Pub Date: May 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62217-927-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: WaveCloud Corporation
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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