by Heok Kim Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A memoir of self-discovery set against an immigrant’s investigation of her family’s past.
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Smith explores the culture of death and her Korean roots in this debut memoir.
Following the death of her father, Smith, a Korean immigrant, faced a crisis of purpose. Married, in her late 20s, and living in San Diego, the loss of her father and her resulting contemplations of mortality led her to understand that, although she was happy, she was unfulfilled. She decided to go to college (her husband did, too), where she was introduced to the world of art and art history and realized that she was “a creative being.” After a decade in academia, however, she needed more. Her gaze turned inward to her own history. After initially rejecting her Korean roots following her immigration to America, she came to embrace them as a bridge to her family and their history: her grandfather who opposed Japanese occupation; her parents who met and lived in the Chinese city of Harbin; her dead father; her mother, suffering from dementia. Knowing their stories became her creative project, and, with her husband, Smith traveled to Korea and China to learn more. What began as a book about her grandfather and the Korean independence movement quickly morphed into the biography of an immigrant family in three different countries and a memoir about how death can illuminate life with a new, profound brilliance. Smith is a talented writer, though she spends more time than necessary on her American period of prolonged postgraduate noodling, recalling influential professors, recounting books and movies that moved her, and attempting to figure out her vague but worthy calling. She attributes great meaning to the small signs she encounters in her daily life—she once saw five four-leaf clovers, which she determined to be a message from her dead father. Things pick up about 100 pages in, when the author explores Korea’s history and her family’s relationship to it. Her discoveries are genuinely interesting and lend a moving (if tardy) urgency to the book in the same way they lend increased meaning to Smith’s sense of herself.
A memoir of self-discovery set against an immigrant’s investigation of her family’s past.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Creative Herds Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011
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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