A rigorous and highly accessible work on forging better connections within oneself and with others.
Positive psychology researcher Klussman offers workarounds for modern ennui in this debut motivational guide.
Between smartphones, instant messaging, and social media, many people in today’s society are more connected than ever before. Why, then, do many of us feel so alone? “Our modern culture encourages us to be disconnected from our inner truth at every turn and instead encourages us to be enchanted by shallow pursuits,” asserts Klussman in her introduction. She’s developed a theory of well-being to help others try to get around these isolating tendencies, including one inspired by her work with terminally ill patients who, she notes, “were usually not suffering much emotionally—they were in a heightened state of awareness, in touch with the deepest parts of themselves, and living those truths every day.” In this book, the author lays out her “connection theory,” which seeks to counter the rises of anxiety and depression in the digital age. By identifying the causes of one’s unhappiness, she argues, one can work to become more connected to ourselves, to our loved ones, to our communities, and to the world. She lays out the many different forms of connection, most of which involve a reorientation toward the self and one’s beliefs, emotions, and physicality. Klussman’s prose is soothing and often personal, illustrating her arguments with examples from her own life, as when she discusses returning to figure skating as a form of physical activity despite her fears she was too old for the sport: “I pushed past the voices and signed up for weekly group lessons at a nearby rink. I was nervous at first, but soon the sensation of gliding and moving across the ice had me giddy and feeling like a kid again.” The author’s background is in clinical psychology, and her work marries the heft of academic research with more zeitgeist-oriented notions of self-care and motivational culture. Her advice ends up being similar to what one can find in many other self-help books, but the ideas behind it are particularly insightful and well articulated.
A rigorous and highly accessible work on forging better connections within oneself and with others.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68-364715-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Sounds True
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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IN THE NEWS
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