Fresh insights about the ways we understand reality.
Why humans need to tell new stories.
Literary scholar Gottschall, who celebrated humans’ propensity for telling tales in The Storytelling Animal, now considers ways stories “sway us for the worse.” Why, he asks, thinking of conspiracy stories (which are not, he insists, theories), climate change deniers, and news stories that produce feelings of despair, “do stories seem to be driving our species mad?” Given the ubiquity of stories in every culture and their potential to create conflict, he focuses his thoughtful and entertaining investigation on a critical question: “How can we save the world from stories?” Drawing on philosophy (Plato is a recurring figure), psychology, anthropology, neurobiology, history, and literature and interweaving personal anecdotes and snippets of popular culture, Gottschall acknowledges that stories have powerful emotional impact. From ancient times, they emerged “as a tool of tribal cohesion and competition,” structured with a “universal grammar” that is “paranoid and vindictive”: Characters try to solve predicaments, facing trouble and often a clearly defined villain. Such stories generate empathy for the characters in peril while creating a kind of “moral blindness” regarding villains. This paradigm, Gottschall argues, shapes our stories about society, politics, and even history, “a genre of speculative narrative that projects our current obsessions onto the past.” Rather than depict Nazis or White supremacists as villains, Gottschall suggests that they were not “worse people than us” but had the “moral misfortune” of being born into cultures which mistakenly defined bad as good. When we villainize, he warns, we dehumanize, sinking into sanctimony and hate. With “folk tales” erupting and spreading “with incredible speed and ease on the internet” and with a political figure he dubs the Big Blare reigning as a supreme storyteller, Gottschall exhorts readers to become aware of storytelling biases and to learn to tell a story “where we are protagonists on the same quest.”
Fresh insights about the ways we understand reality.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5416-4596-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
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
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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