A flawed but useful call to arms in the fight against childhood obesity.
A chronicle of the painful, long-term effects of being a “fat kid.”
With the rise of childhood obesity rates comes a new set of challenges for families and communities, write Warren and Smalley, co-directors of the Rural Health Research Institute at Georgia Southern University. Obese children face a combination of physical and psychological problems resulting in what the authors call “The Fat Kid Syndrome.” Not only do these children often suffer from diabetes and high blood pressure, but they may also develop low self-esteem and compulsive behaviors. Further, they will likely experience depression and anxiety in greater numbers than their thinner peers—not to mention discrimination based on their appearance from colleagues, potential mates and even employers. The authors touch briefly on the causes of childhood obesity, including easy access to fast food, increased portion sizes and decreased emphasis on exercise. They also argue that parents are unwilling to speak honestly to their children about weight and that even doctors are instructed to avoid the topic out of fear of insulting or upsetting children. Warren and Smalley focus on raising awareness about the dangers of childhood obesity, and a short concluding chapter offers advice on how to help children and their families. They also include a helpful resource guide that includes nutrition, fitness and weight-control programs geared toward children. While childhood obesity is a trendy topic, even the authors acknowledge that there hasn’t been enough time to research the long-term effects of the current epidemic. Therefore, much of what Smalley and Warren write about is speculation. They also come dangerously close to overgeneralizing the experience of obesity; certainly not all “fat kids” will suffer the extremes they describe.
A flawed but useful call to arms in the fight against childhood obesity.Pub Date: March 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0230341777
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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
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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