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
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
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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