Hardly groundbreaking but a pleasant little book about making connections.
Don’t be a stranger advises this short book on connecting with others.
The publishing imprint of TED Talks offers another in a series of what might be considered self-help books, though world-help might be more in keeping with the ambition of these “small books about big ideas.” Yes, suggests novelist and consultant Stark (Follow Me Down, 2011, etc.), reaching out to others you don’t know, even with a simple “Hello,” will likely make you feel better about yourself and about others—assuming the target of your connection isn’t shocked or offended. Indeed, writes the author, “a shimmer of connection…can also have an effect on the larger political world, leading us away from fear and building toward openness, cooperation, and genuine understanding.” Discomfort and even fear might prevent some from making such connections, and social context plays a significant role as well. Some cultures discourage even making eye contact with those one doesn’t know, let alone initiating conversation. Some differences—gender, race, class, income—can lead to an imbalance that puts more of the power and/or risk on one side than the other. And most of us are fine with what the author terms “civil inattention,” which maintains the illusion of functioning privately or in solitude while in a public place, barely acknowledging the presence of others. “Civil inattention in these situations, the park and the café, the theater and the concert, also amounts to a denial of shared experience,” writes Stark. “Sometimes that’s a terrible loss.” If you let yourself get to know someone of another religion or race or nationality, you have learned to see her as something other than the “other,” and “it opens up your idea of who counts as human.”
Hardly groundbreaking but a pleasant little book about making connections.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1998-9
Page Count: 120
Publisher: TED/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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