A scattered account of a scatterbrained life with all manner of depravity and, underneath it all, earnestness.
Harnisch (The Oxygen Tank, 2016, etc.) offers a novel about the complicated world of a mentally ill mind.
Benjamin J. Schreiber, who suffers from a range of psychiatric disorders, finds himself in court-mandated therapy with Dr. C. “It was either therapy or prison,” Dr. C tells readers, following an incident in which Ben acted oddly at a so-called “non-cash bank.” Ben then embarks on a journey to investigate his troubled world. Using writing as a release and Dr. C as a guide, Ben explores the realm of his alter ego, one “Georgie Gust,” detailing their intertwined lives. The murkiness of their relationship is summed up by Ben’s insistence that he will often “send [Georgie] gifts and then keep them for myself.” As a result, the novel puts into play the ambiguity of reality. The concept of fractured identities is at the heart of this adventure that encompasses a visit to a foot-fetish club and family recollections: “Life with mother was always borderline this, crisis-after-crisis that.” In other words, it’s an adventure that’s as scattered as the disorders it portrays. It throws in a generous collection of literary devices, including diary entries, parenthetical pet peeves (“Backs always itch where and when I can’t reach to scratch”), and the controlling character of Claudia Nesbitt, who engages in various, unusual sexual activities. If it all sounds disorienting, that would seem to be the author’s intention. Readers intrigued by such a swerving tale can expect to encounter all manner of kookiness and, ultimately, honesty; as one journal entry insists, “I let my freak flag shine with my mentally ill mind and unsurpassed resiliency.” That said, the novel is occasionally repetitive (the terms “schizophrenia” and “schizophrenic” appear with enough frequency to lose their meaning) and unapologetically crude (“Her vagina looked so lonely”), so it’s certainly not a story for the squeamish or those seeking more conventional constructions.
A scattered account of a scatterbrained life with all manner of depravity and, underneath it all, earnestness.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5239-4120-9
Page Count: 300
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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