Uplifting, strongly researched but accessible book by Kathy Cronkite, Walter's daughter, following her studiously serious On the Edge of the Spotlight (1981). Herself a victim of what Winston Churchill called ``the black dog,'' and here offering hope and courage, Cronkite attacks the stigma of depression, describes the disease as it's known through the latest research, and interviews well-known medical researchers and famed victims—including Mike Wallace, Joan Rivers, Dick Clark, Kitty Dukakis, Rod Steiger, Rona Barrett, Ann Buchwald, Jules Feiffer, John Kenneth Galbraith, Rose and William Styron, and Judith Belushi Pisano, among others. Clinical depression, Cronkite finds, can't be lifted by simple affirmative pick-me-ups and self- help slogans: ``However, if you've had one bout of depression and can learn to recognize the symptoms early on, often you can avert a full-blown relapse by practicing good self-care and self-esteem building activities....'' Says Barbara Parry, M.D.: ``Over the course of a lifetime, if depression is not treated aggressively in its early stages, it tends to get worse, not better. You don't develop antibodies.'' Cronkite focuses on ``moderate, unipolar [no manic highs], major depression, not on the small percentage of the severely ill, the chronically hospitalized, the psychotic, or on those whose depression is amenable to self-help therapy, such as exercise or meditation.'' Is depression biological or psychological? It's always both, says Dr. A. John Bush. Life stress doesn't do the illness any good, ``but it doesn't explain everything; people have an underlying biological/genetic proclivity, and with or without the stress, they get the illness.'' Riveting, with not a dull word throughout. Should be of help to depressives in understanding their illness while seeking treatment.
Pub Date: March 9, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-42194-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
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
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
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