A clear, informative, and wide-ranging Q&A collection.
Spiritual teacher and life coach Kwang presents a series of interviews about mental health, with a focus on Singapore.
This third installment in the author’s series, following Growing Pains (2022), features conversations with a wide variety of professionals about mental health. The project is a compilation of interviews that the author and histeam conducted with 75 people, from medical doctors and psychiatrists to politicians and business executives. The book’s overarching theme is how mental health is an “invisible force” in people’s lives, and how one’s environment affects one’s well-being. In each chapter, Kwang or a team member interviews subjects who provide care and support in a specialized area. In one chapter, for example, Kwang talks with mental health counselor Vickineswarie Jagadharan about the nature of grief in general and her personal experiences in dealing with the loss of her son to suicide: “Over time, I realized the pain never [goes] away,” she tells Kwang. “As time goes by, the pain gets lesser and lesser, but it will always be there.” In another chapter, geriatrician Nur Farhan Bte Mohammad Alami describes the particular vulnerabilities of elderly people: “If you are twenty or thirty years old and you have emotional baggage, then by eighty, you have a huge baggage.” Everything from interpersonal relationships to collective trauma gets time in the spotlight. Fortunately for this book series, Kwang is an excellent interviewer—informed but never overbearing, and always ready to abandon a set line of questioning in favor of following a conversation wherever it may lead. The core of his own health care ethos, sketched in his preface to this volume, is to “keep going,” no matter how dark things seem, to admit to one’s struggle, and to ask for help. As he points out during a talk with Parliament of Singapore member Carrie Tan, although people now talk more openly about mental health issues, “Something is still missing.” This book works to provide that missing element with sympathetic and frank discussions.
A clear, informative, and wide-ranging Q&A collection.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2022
ISBN: 9789815058277
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Penguin Random House SEA
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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