A compelling, if sometimes-painful, read that offers a lesson in personal resilience.
A hard-luck memoir, intertwined with life lessons on empathy.
This account of psychologist Marshack’s (Entrepreneurial Couples, 2017, etc.) traumatic trials and tribulations will likely elicit great empathy for the author herself. In a personal narrative that’s troubling but often engaging, she documents the fallout from her divorce, her challenging relationship with her daughters (one is autistic and the other suffers from the effects of a brain injury), and her arduous, toxic legal battle with neighbors over property rights. It’s almost unimaginable what the author goes through, and following her journey from chapter to chapter could leave one emotionally spent. Her negative experiences led her to consider why some people have empathy and others do not; her reflection resulted in the “Empathy Dysfunction Scale (EmD Scale),” which she says can help readers “identify the kind of people you’re dealing with in your life.” Overall, though, the book largely concentrates, almost to a fault, on the injustices that the author says that she suffered during a very ugly dispute with authorities and neighbors over residential land use. Indeed, the extent to which the book describes the case—with accompanying reprinted emails and property drawings—is extraordinary, and its tone sometimes feels almost vindictive. However, the book is engaging when it addresses Marshack’s five levels of “EmDs.” The second chapter does a particularly good job of describing each one of these, ranging from EmD-0 (“having zero degrees of empathy but not intending harm”) to EmD-5 (“epitomizing empathy”). By the end of the author’s sad but engaging tale, the EmD levels do resonate, and the implications of empathy dysfunction become clear.
A compelling, if sometimes-painful, read that offers a lesson in personal resilience.Pub Date: March 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-979969-00-0
Page Count: 554
Publisher: US Observer Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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