An adept introduction to an innovative thinker whose dramatic flair and sometimes-messianic personality tended to overshadow...
The son of the psychiatrist who founded psychodrama examines the life of his “famous, eccentric, and controversial” father and traces the evolution and impact of his ideas.
For clarity, Moreno (Philosophy and Medical Ethics/Univ. of Pennsylvania; The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America, 2011, etc.) refers to his subject as J.L. throughout the book. Born in Bucharest in 1889, J.L. rejected Freudian theory while still a medical student. Early in his career, he developed a form of psychotherapy he called psychodrama, in which the stage becomes a therapeutic platform. From the 1940s to the 1970s, public psychodrama sessions were a feature of Manhattan’s Moreno Institute. Recognized as one of the leading social scientists in the United States, J.L. believed that spontaneity and creativity are driving forces in human nature and that love and mutual sharing are powerful principles. In J.L.’s view, improvisation and spontaneity come together in psychodrama, providing a way for members to help each other. Moreno shows the influence of his father’s ideas in the “happenings” of the 1960s and the group-dynamic experiments of the human potential movement. That J.L.’s ideas percolated through popular culture, though in watered-down form, is aptly demonstrated in the author’s discussion of the hit movie Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), in which the characters experience an Esalen-like encounter, and of Clint Eastwood’s 2012 empty-chair role-playing performance at the Republican convention, a technique rooted in improvisational theater that J.L. used in Vienna a century earlier. J.L.’s insights into group relationships—he created the science of sociometry—predates by decades the success of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. The attention-loving J.L. understood the human impulse for self-expression and the desire to belong to a group.
An adept introduction to an innovative thinker whose dramatic flair and sometimes-messianic personality tended to overshadow his accomplishments.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-934137-84-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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