SULTRY CLIMATES

Name: SULTRY CLIMATES
Author: Ian Littlewood
ISBN: 0-306-81155-3

by Ian Littlewood ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2001

Much travel is for pleasure, and Littlewood has made the obvious, if not widely acknowledged leap, returning with a wealth...

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A survey of the erotic lines of force that run through the habits of travel abroad from the 17th century to the present.

Travel and sex have always been linked simply by simple opportunity, Littlewood (The Idea of Japan, 1996) reminds us: “journeying in cramped coaches, eating at communal tables, sleeping in public inns.” With the rise of the notion of a Grand Tour in the late 17th century, he argues, a certain kind of travel (usually over a period of several years) became a rite of passage considered essential to the proper education of a gentleman. Predominantly male, upper class, and English, these Grand Tourists had the economic power to attract sexual interest, the acquisitive instincts to sample sexual as well as cultural products, and the immersion in a foreign lifestyle that encouraged the adoption of perceived foreign sexual mores; a change of view permits a change of morals. There are other sorts of travelers too: pilgrims from E.M. Forster to Jack Kerouac have combined the urges for travel, sex, and enlightenment (Forster also shows “where the inequalities of status between tourist and native can lead”); and rebels such as Byron traveled in defiance, motivated by sexual dissatisfaction at home (today’s gay and lesbian travel movement shares some of the same impulses). Myths are as important as reality here: the vision of the South Seas as a prelapsarian paradise, first voiced in James Cook’s 1769 journal, was later embellished by Paul Gauguin, Pasha Brooke, and Evelyn Waugh. Through them all runs a constant, subterranean theme: “The moment of illicit sexual satisfaction is a brief erotic victory over the rest of the world, a successful raid on the kingdom of propriety.”

Much travel is for pleasure, and Littlewood has made the obvious, if not widely acknowledged leap, returning with a wealth of sensual travelers’ tales, sordid to voltaic. His points are well taken.

Pub Date: April 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-306-81155-3

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Da Capo

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY

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THE ART OF THINKING CLEARLY

by Rolf Dobelli translated by Nicky Griffin ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 14, 2013

Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.

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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

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

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...

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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.