An earnest and well-researched call to action and an urgent message that will hopefully expand in Zaki’s future work.
The director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory asserts that human empathy and kindness can be developed skills.
With alarming evidence of our society’s rapidly diminishing empathy, Zaki (Psychology/Stanford Univ.) draws on decades of clinical research, along with experiments conducted at his lab, to consider the forces that impact our modern condition. “The news is not good,” he writes. “Empathy has dwindled steadily especially in the twenty-first century. The average person in 2009 was less empathic than 75 percent of the people in 1979.” The author goes on to recount examples of how individuals and groups have worked toward reversing this trend. These include a former white supremacist who, after becoming a father, found new meaning in his life, enabling him to reverse his negative and often violent instincts. Along with a group of like-minded colleagues, he formed a nonprofit support group called Life After Hate, which “works to extract people from the dark place he once inhabited.” Similarly, the alternative sentencing program Changing Lives Through Literature helps convicts become more empathetic by expanding their self-awareness through reading about fictional characters who have struggled through their own challenging issues. Zaki further considers degrees of empathy, especially regarding health care workers and other caretakers, offering examples of how to work effectively without burning out from the pressure of needing to fix all problems. He also reviews our quickly evolving technological advances, highlighting the many opportunities where technology can serve to enhance empathy. While Zaki’s many examples offer encouragement that change is possible, the book could have further benefited by a more substantive action plan and a resource list. “In five years, or one, the world could be a meaner place or a kinder one. Our social fabric could further tear or start to mend,” writes the author, so “…the direction we take—and our collective fate—depends, in a real way, on what each of us decides to feel.”
An earnest and well-researched call to action and an urgent message that will hopefully expand in Zaki’s future work.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-49924-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
In three essays based on lectures, Lewis provides an engaging overview of the cultural and political clash between Christian Europe and the Islamic world from the late 15th to the early 19th centuries. Lewis (Near Eastern Studies/Princeton Univ.; Islam and the West, 1993, etc.) takes as his starting point 1492, the year not only of Columbus's discovery of the "New World" but also of Catholic Spain's victory over Islam, after four centuries of struggle, on the Iberian Peninsula. Six months later, Ferdinand and Isabella expelled Spain's Jews, with profound repercussions for all three monotheistic civilizations. Though banished from Western Europe, it wasn't until 1683 that Muslim armies, under the flag of the Ottoman Empire, were repulsed from Vienna for the last time. In briefly tracing the millennium-long clash, Lewis demonstrates how the Christian and Islamic cultures sometimes mirrored each other, noting, for example, that the Crusade resembles a jihad and that the European Renaissance was preceded about 500 years earlier by a great Muslim cultural flowering. He writes far more briefly of Judaism, but here, too, he illuminates, as in his clear discussion of the economic and political forces that drove the Ottoman Empire to welcome the Jews expelled from Spain. Lewis's multilayered analysis of why the West ultimately gained the upper hand over the Islamic world ranges broadly from the technological (the West used gunpowder, which the Muslim world largely scorned) to the linguistic (Western Europe developed written vernaculars from Latin, which accelerated receptivity to cultural change, while the Islamic world retained the beautiful, but somewhat stilted, style of classical Arabic well into the modern era). The book is marred only by a closing, overstated paean to Western civilization, in which Lewis claims that Western thinkers alone in human history have manifested intense curiosity about cultures other than their own. Still, despite its tantalizing brevity, an elegant book.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0195102835
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Eminently useful, although somewhat contradictory, this admiring intellectual biography of an iconoclastic psychoanalyst recapitulates the strengths and weaknesses of its subject's thought. Karen Horney (18851952) played a key role in the development of psychoanalysis between the wars and transcended her discipline as a feminist thinker. Horney scholar Paris (English/Univ. of Florida) surveys the psychoanalyst's ideas while locating their sources in her personal experiences. He builds on the work of previous biographers Jack Rubins (Karen Horney, 1978) and Susan Quinn (A Mind of Her Own, not reviewed), who brought messy details of Horney's life to light without, he contends, fully relating them to her mature theory. For Paris, Horney's ideas represent her effort to come to grips with her own problems—to perform, as her best-known title has it, a ``self-analysis.'' After a lucid account of Horney's youth in Germany, Paris treats her early, relatively orthodox essays and her subsequent development of a theory of feminine psychology. He shows how pondering social concerns led Horney to consider the cultural dimensions of neurosis and eventually to develop a new paradigm of psychological structure as a complete, ongoing system, rather than an individual story only understandable through recourse to its occluded origins. Her adult life was thorny: Paris discusses her ``female Don Juanism,'' her battles in the bitter psychoanalytic arena, and her difficult affairs with famed rivals like Erich Fromm. Extensive commentaries on Horney's late thought tie these strands together, focusing on ideas about pride and defense strategies expressed in Our Inner Conflicts and Neurosis and Human Growth. Throughout, Paris maintains allegiance to Horney's conviction that we each have a true inner self, even while he depicts stark discontinuities among the facets of her own personality. It will take a grander synthesis than his, one that incorporates wider historical and cultural context, to really resolve this tension between Horney's thought and life. In the interim, however, this serves as a fine introduction to a stimulating thinker whose influence continues to rise as therapy becomes more pragmatic and less dogmatic.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-300-05956-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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