by Jonah Lehrer ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2016
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
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012
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
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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