Bering illuminates a murky, misunderstood human quandary with compassion, confessional honesty, and academic perception.
A coherent, relevant look at the psychological secrets of suicide.
“The catchall mental illness explanation only takes us so far,” writes science writer Bering (Science Communication/Univ. of Otago, New Zealand; Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us, 2013, etc.) in this fascinating study featuring some startling real-time facts and perspectives on a sadly enduring phenomenon. The author lays bare the possible root causes and outward complications when someone with periodic depression or a fleetingly sporadic compulsion ends their life. For such a fiercely complex subject with varying nuances, viewpoints, and interpretations, Bering imparts accessible information through an affable, conversational tone. Supplementing his research material are chapters detailing the author’s own private struggle. Bering, 43, openly admits to being haunted by suicidal feelings. Being outed as gay in his teens and then weathering chronic employment and career burnout as an adult continued to push “those despairing buttons.” The author probes ethics and rationales, the mysteries of animal suicides, the opposing viewpoints on “suicidal thinking,” and the daunting task of loved ones and forensic investigators to re-create what victims felt prior to committing the act since the “why” often proves just as harrowing as the “how.” Bering also shares stories of families ripped apart by suicide as they struggle to reconnect through the haze of devastating emotional pain. Bering concedes that having dark impulses is more commonplace than people would like to believe, and he highlights theories held by neuropsychiatrists and suicidologists who have isolated a specific neuron possibly responsible for suicidal intent. He also analyzes less esoteric, more “common currents” while openly admitting that his own suicidal ideation “flares up like a sore tooth at the whims of bad fortune, subsides for a while, yet always threatens to throb again.” This important book arms readers with contemporary insight to help “short-circuit the powerful impetus to die when things look calamitous.”
Bering illuminates a murky, misunderstood human quandary with compassion, confessional honesty, and academic perception.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-226-46332-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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