An untethered collection of one man’s thoughts that introduces readers to the possibilities of chapbook-style constructions.
Harnisch (Freak, 2016, etc.) presents a semiautobiographical book of meditations on mental illness and the world at large.
The author explains in an introduction that his book is “an intentionally non-linear, plotless narrative that reflects the chaotic structure of Jonathan Harnisch’s mind.” And, as the contents make evident, one would be hard-pressed to come up with a more apt description. The 21 short chapters feature titles ranging from the raunchy “Ode to Granny the Tranny: Nurse Natalie” to the more perplexing “I am a Responsive Santa on Steroids.” The book was written, to some extent, as a response to Myriam Gurba’s 2011 book Wish You Were Me, and it offers a loose foray into Harnisch’s thinking that’s full of singsong prose (“Maybe at a museum. At the MOMA—The motherfucking Museum of Modern Art”). Topics include schizophrenia and a lost connection with actor Mel Gibson: “He and I have built memories together, just memories, and the resurrection of reconnecting. We haven’t been in touch since 2005 or 2006.” There’s also a graphic love rant (“I’m sick over you. I want to throw up all my love on you”) and a note on personal endurance (“my resilience emanates from the greatest lesson I’ve learned: laughter”). This book is every bit as free-wheeling as the introduction implies, providing a glimpse at its author’s inner workings—both in its flights of fancy and in its more earnest sentiments. It’s in the tradition of such other autobiographical writers as Kathy Acker (described herein as the author’s “fantasy date”), and it provides a light skim across the waters of a self-described “mentally ill artist” who’s not all too keen on how readers will feel about any of it: “Wander the reader astray, do not attempt to care for the reader, kill the reader.” Overall, it’s an assuredly brief collage of varied, unabashedly unpolished feelings.
An untethered collection of one man’s thoughts that introduces readers to the possibilities of chapbook-style constructions.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5238-3732-8
Page Count: 66
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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