Wise, cleareyed advice about a wide range of personal predicaments.
A psychiatrist offers a collection of essays about life and learning.
Sones opens his debut with a quick disclaimer regarding the fact that the title of his book echoes that of the great 12th-century work of philosophical inquiry by Maimonides. Although the author is self-deprecating, readers familiar with Maimonides will notice some similarities in tone and manner. Sones draws on his nearly 60 years of experience as a psychiatrist to address a large variety of personal and social topics, ranging from how to deal with verbal abuse to strategies for improving self-discipline and much more. Not all of the case studies he describes from his practice are glowing successes. In one typical story, for instance, a patient he calls Sam, who has been dealing with obsessive-compulsive disorder, is skeptical of the whole process of therapy and leaves shortly after getting a prescription. Wrapped around these clinical tales are the author’s observations about more general subjects connected with mental health. These reflections are written in a bright, approachable prose that will prompt a good deal of reader confidence in Sones’ calm wisdom. The subject of “training” attention, for example, is set in the context of the human psyche: “Attention tends to get captured by negative possibilities and this remarkable brain of ours can generate endless negative possibilities (fantasies).” But, the author asserts, humans can exercise an element of control over the attention mechanism. Some of these insights may surprise readers in their pragmatic utility, as when Sones dispassionately discusses the tactics, good and bad, of conducting an extramarital affair (“If you have to confess,” he deadpans, “go see your priest; if that is not your persuasion, see a psychiatrist”). But such digressions should actually be predictable. As its title indicates, the book is designed to give solid counsel, not moralistic judgments. And it succeeds very neatly at that—readers faced with personal problems will find these pages enlightening.
Wise, cleareyed advice about a wide range of personal predicaments.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-7346130-9-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Spenser Publishing House, LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a man who has seen it all, and he sure does know how to tell a story.
Fighting back against a nearly fatal health crisis, a renowned foreign correspondent reviews his career.
New York Times journalist Nordland, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has reported from more than 150 countries. Working in Delhi on July 4, 2019, he had a seizure and lost consciousness. At that point, he began his “second life,” one defined by a glioblastoma multiforme tumor. “From 3 to 6 percent of glioblastoma patients are cured; one of them will bear my name,” writes the author, while claiming that the disease “has proved to be the best thing that ever happened to me.” From the perspective of his second life, which marked the end of his estrangement from his adult children, he reflects on his first, which began with a difficult childhood in Philadelphia. His abusive father was a “predatory pedophile.” His mother, fortunately, was “astonishingly patient and saintly,” and Nordland and his younger siblings stuck close together. After a brief phase of youthful criminality, the author began his career in journalism at the Penn State campus newspaper. Interspersing numerous landmark articles—some less interesting than others, but the best are wonderful—Nordland shows how he carried out the burden of being his father’s son: “Whether in Bosnia or Kabul, Cambodia or Nigeria, Philadelphia or Baghdad, I always seemed to gravitate toward stories about vulnerable people, especially women and children—since they will always be the most vulnerable in any society—being exploited or mistreated by powerful men or powerful social norms.” Indeed, some of the stories reveal the worst in human nature. A final section, detailing his life since his diagnosis in chapters such as “I Forget the Name of This Chapter: On Memory,” wraps up the narrative with humor, candor, and reflection.
This is a man who has seen it all, and he sure does know how to tell a story.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780063096226
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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