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
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
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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