While the book adequately covers a good deal of research and systematically examines the rewards and challenges of intimacy,...
Journalist Lehrer addresses the power of human attachment.
The author, two of whose earlier books were taken out of print for plagiarism and invention of quotations and who lost his job at the New Yorker as a result, avoids any such potential problems in a book that is as nebulous as its title suggests. Lehrer footnotes and cites sources constantly and scrupulously, with the result that the book looks more like an academic paper than a work of popular psychology. Unfortunately, he is so restrained and careful that he doesn’t risk saying anything new. The author’s main argument is that “love hold[s] us together, when everything else falls apart.” The kind of love he praises is not the “fickle desire” of Romeo and Juliet but the steady bond that endures over time. “Love is the ultimate source of lasting pleasure,” he writes, “but let’s be honest: it’s also the hardest work. That’s why it takes grit.” Lehrer chronicles his interviews with a few researchers, most notably “spry eighty-year-old” George Vaillant, who interviewed subjects of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, a decadeslong examination of men who attended Harvard, and came to the conclusion that “Happiness equals love. Full stop.” For the most part, however, Lehrer rehashes familiar territory, covering the experiments of early-20th-century psychologists John Watson and John Bowlby and scanning the novels of Jane Austen for their insights. In general, the author comes to the conclusion that the ability to love is based on attachments formed with parents in infancy and early childhood. In the longest sections of the book, he dutifully covers love for one’s parents, one’s spouse, one’s children, and God. He tends to favor examples of love involving heterosexual couples with children.
While the book adequately covers a good deal of research and systematically examines the rewards and challenges of intimacy, it doesn’t make love sound like a whole lot of fun.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6139-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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
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