A dense, thorough guide that alternates philosophical musings with concrete suggestions.
A comprehensive guide to healing that incorporates psychological, physical, and spiritual practices for overall wellness.
As an integrative psychiatrist and neuroscientist, Lavretsky aims to help readers use scientifically backed strategies alongside time-tested spiritual practices to improve overall life satisfaction by “living from the Soul” (which occurs when people are “living in their authenticity, uninfluenced by others, or any events in their lives”). The author discusses why and how one can get in touch with the soul and the importance of learning how to self-regulate, which is essentially the process in which one learns to change emotional and physical responses to particular situations. The idea is that changing behavior can eventually lead to a more positive and adaptive rewiring of the brain, allowing people to experience the world around them more fully. Building this sense of resilience and elasticity can ultimately help people meet problems head-on with minimal physical or mental suffering, per Lavretsky. The author provides a handful of diagrams at the book’s beginning that can aid more visual learners, including one detailing the brain regions involved in emotion regulation and the body’s chakra centers. Lavretsky suggests a plethora of various methods and tools from which readers can choose on their way to healing, including breathing exercises, grounding, and acupuncture for self-regulation and mindfulness meditation, trauma-informed yoga, and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing for healing trauma. The variety of options greatly increases the likelihood that readers will find something that speaks to them personally. In between passages offering concrete advice, Lavretsky often waxes philosophical about the issues at hand, such as the idea of consciousness as it relates to the self and “spiritual emergences” that can occur both with or without the use of psychedelics. While these musings are certainly intriguing, they may not appeal to audiences who are unfamiliar with alternative medicine in general. Ultimately, the author delivers a detailed, somewhat loquacious handbook for those hoping to strengthen their mind, body, and spirit connection.
A dense, thorough guide that alternates philosophical musings with concrete suggestions.Pub Date: July 7, 2026
ISBN: 9798888503133
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Park Street Press
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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