A flawed but standout effort that rewards readers with new understanding.
A psychotherapist looks at the complexities of denial and suggests ways to gently and gradually gain some control over denial-based behaviors.
Wright puts everyone, including himself, on the couch to make the case that denial is among life’s greatest limiters, but it typically escapes our notice. In fact, he explains, we’re often deeply and disadvantageously invested in not noticing what we’re ignoring. We may cling to a miserable status quo owing to a fear of change and low self-esteem. Worse, invoking willpower to overcome excessive drinking, overeating, smoking or nail biting will likely fail repeatedly and make us feel helpless to change until we understand what drives our willful ignorance. Only when we begin the painful work of clearing away the clouds of our denial, the author maintains, can we hope to make measured progress toward transformation. Patience, persistence and self-empathy then allow for small, successive feats of progress—though not great leaps—as we begin to counteract genetically predisposed, neurologically ingrained behaviors that may go back to infancy and childhood. At its best, this book of high intent provokes healthy if uncomfortable introspection. Many are likely to have flashes illuminating their own particular denial pathology, and for them, the author’s admonition to accept some responsibility while avoiding self-blame is helpful. Wright concedes that what fills pages here abbreviates tomes of material, and this leads to some paragraphs and sentences that need further explanation. But he also writes with impact, as when he discusses empathy: “When we are in denial, we aren’t even walking in our own shoes.”
A flawed but standout effort that rewards readers with new understanding.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475053050
Page Count: 270
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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
BOOK REVIEW
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IN THE NEWS
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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