Though often touching on profoundly sad situations, Samuel’s stories and reflections consistently hit an authentically...
A psychotherapist shares stories and advice from her 25-year practice as a grief counselor.
The death of a beloved family member, partner, or friend is an experience that will affect everyone at some point, yet communication surrounding the process of mourning can be awkward. Many individuals remain in a state of denial until the reality of losing someone hits them head-on, and while the pain triggered by the loss may eventually be minimized, ultimately there’s no getting around it. In this moving and insightful debut, Samuel offers an accessible handbook for anyone undergoing this experience, eloquently steering readers through the progression of understanding and accepting pain in order to move on in their lives. “In continuing to deny death,” writes the author, “we are inevitably denying the richness of life….Loss is intrinsic to the human experience….But in order to live truly, to experience life fully, we need to be able to accept that. We sometimes need to sit with pain and to accept discomfort. And at the far end of the spectrum of loss is grief, which is one of the greatest manifestations of psychological pain that we can go through.” The book is arranged in sections focusing on the nature of the loss—partner, parent, sibling, or child—with case studies of how individuals found some level of solace through their own approach to a particular grieving experience. In a later chapter, Samuel touches on facing your own death, and the final culminating section, “What helps: the work we need to do to help us grieve and survive successfully,” includes constructive advice for those who want to offer support. As a guide for the newly grieving, the book succeeds on many levels, and the author’s compassionate storytelling skills provide even broader appeal.
Though often touching on profoundly sad situations, Samuel’s stories and reflections consistently hit an authentically inspiring note.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8153-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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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The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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