A humane, elegantly written contribution to the literature of trauma and care.
A scholar of psychology and psychiatry examines some of the changing regimes by which the mentally troubled are treated.
Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind, Touched With Fire, and Night Falls Fast, opens with a graceful portrait of Sir William Osler (1849-1919), the medical pioneer recognized by American doctors a century later as “the most influential physician in history.” Osler explored many aspects of medicine, but much of what concerned him toward the end of his life had to do with the death of his son, who was badly injured on the Western Front. Returned to combat, he died there. “Death had been Osler’s tutor for the shadowland,” writes Jamison. “As a young pathologist he had performed nearly a thousand autopsies; he was keenly aware of the debt owed by the living to the dead.” Now it was personal, and he and some of his peers urged physicians to use the same attentive and loving care nurses delivered, with the charge to “bear witness to suffering, not flinch from it; be still with it and apprehend its meaning.” Those mind-oriented physicians had plenty to do when unfortunate veterans such as the poet Siegfried Sassoon, shellshocked and tormented, sought postwar care. (Said one physician to Sassoon, while on home leave before returning to the front, “you appear to be suffering from an anti-war complex.”) Jamison moves on to a consideration of the ancient connections of healing, ritual, and magic, some of which come into play in modern therapy. Along the way, while looking further at stress- and trauma-borne illness, the author studs her narrative with luminous figures such as Paul Robeson and Robert Graves, whose book Goodbye to All That was “a bitter, unsentimental account of war, atrocity, and death.” There the hero quest and its challenges come in, and, Jamison concludes memorably: “There is a cost for this, and to redeem it we look to our healers.”
A humane, elegantly written contribution to the literature of trauma and care.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9780525657170
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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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