A well-organized and edifying introduction to late-onset ADHD.
Donovan counsels caregivers on approaching an adolescent’s ADHD in this nonfiction guide.
The author, a teacher, began noticing changes in her daughter’s behavior while the girl was in the sixth grade—she became terribly restless and had difficulties focusing, problems that contributed to her increasing anxiety. As her challenges grew more severe (including a seething anger), she turned to drugs, alcohol, and self-harm as means to cope. Donovan’s daughter wasn’t officially diagnosed with ADHD until she was 13 years old—it can be exceedingly hard to distinguish symptoms of the condition from the ordinary tumult of teenage life. Her daughter’s predicament compelled the author to radically rethink her approach to parenting: “My daughter’s diagnosis caught me off guard because everything I knew about raising children would not work for her situation. Once her diagnosis had its hooks in our family, I knew I had to throw away my expectations. I had to do something different if I was ever going to be able to understand who she was.” In addition to Donovan’s movingly candid remembrance of her child’s ordeal, she also furnishes a deep wellspring of practical advice and information for others who may be in a similar circumstance. With accessible clarity and painstaking thoroughness, she discusses the diagnosis itself, the formulation of a treatment plan (which includes finding the right doctors), and vetting pharmaceutical options. The author also outlines customizing the educational experience of a child with ADHD by working with a school psychologist. She broadens her scope to address the emotional trials as well and articulates sensible strategies for managing the stress. For the caregiver who has or might have a child with this disorder, Donovan’s book is a deeply helpful resource, as astute as it is comprehensive.
A well-organized and edifying introduction to late-onset ADHD.Pub Date: April 8, 2023
ISBN: 979-8390395189
Page Count: 194
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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