An uncommonly auspicious debut.
The debut collection by an essayist who writes like a rattlesnake, his sentences coiled yet always ready to strike with venomous impact.
One gets the sense that Whiting Writers’ Award winner Daniels is belatedly coming into his own and exercising some distinct literary muscle. These essays are presented as—but not necessarily written like—letters from the author to himself, and they could pass as fragmentary notes for a memoir or another much longer and more unified work. Not that this slim volume of six pieces doesn’t work on its own; they have a cumulative power that can leave readers devastated. Though “Letter from Majorca,” about his seafaring experiences after he abruptly “quit the university after shouting at a student until she began to cry,” has earned distinction by inclusion in Best American Essays 2013, others are even stronger. Perhaps the best is “Letter from Kentucky,” which found Daniels returning home on a magazine assignment but realizing, “it’s an old story. The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh: you go back to the place but the place isn’t there anymore.” His spare, elemental prose conjures old haunts, old hurts, and old friends who are dead or are in prison before he goes deeper into a meditation on his father, whose “aim was to protect me from the darkness all around us, using the darkness inside himself.” Following this is the extraordinary “Letter from Level Four,” in which the author meets a man who is plainly mad and does his best to avoid him but also sees himself in him. He reflects on his own “brief stay in the hospital,” where “all of this, they told me, was reality. There are no other worlds than this one. There isn’t even this one.”
An uncommonly auspicious debut.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-53594-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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