“You realize you’re very talented,” noted an instructor, and “it’s absolutely terrifying to own that talent.” For the...
A year at the school of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater—the distinguished modern dance company—both well framed and fully alive.
Who are these kids, journalist Fishman (Behind the One-Way Mirror, not reviewed) wonders, “whose skill and enthusiasm began to gather steam just before adolescence, until at some point shortly after they made a more mature—though still early—decision to invest their whole selves in one domain”: to dance. Her venue was the Ailey School—“It is professional, it is highly visual, it is tough and demanding but not without compassion, and it is just a tad quaint”—to seek answers to questions regarding nature and nurture, the physical and emotional and intellectual demands placed on the students; temperament and bodily development; talent and motivation; kinesthetic and musical intelligence. The Ailey School is particularly apt for Fishman, for her writing reflects many of the school’s qualities: focused, no wasted words, strong, knows her stuff or absorbs it like a sponge, conscious of the art at hand. As she tracks the progress of a selection of young dancers at the school, the author draws empathetic portraits that reveal the “spiritual connection and community membership” as well as the role of competition, “the elephant in the living room, a great gray looming thing that’s part of daily life but about which it is not polite to talk.” She’s comfortable, and comfortably conveys, elements of the psychology involved in an adolescent dancer’s life, drawing on the work of Howard Gardner and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—“that talent is a social construction that includes an individual’s traits, the cultural domain in which he works, and the social field of experts who evaluate performance”—and highlighting the risks: the constant rejection, the preoccupation with looks, the neglect of the tasks of adolescence.
“You realize you’re very talented,” noted an instructor, and “it’s absolutely terrifying to own that talent.” For the dancers, likely; for the reader, it is a wonder to behold. (Photographs throughout)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58542-355-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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IN THE NEWS
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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