A concise and heartfelt series of encouragements.
Psychologist Cangilla offers a life guide aimed at smart, ambitious, and compassionate people.
The author directs this work toward those who seek to commit to their own passionate natures while also navigating the everyday demands of the world. Specifically, she says that she hopes to help these readers figure out “how to be sensitive but strong, curious but committed, passionately engaged but protective of your need to rest and recharge.” Cangilla cites unspecified research that indicates that 20% to 30% of the population qualifies as “highly sensitive”; this is defined, in part, as being sensitive to subtleties, easily overstimulated, and experiencing intense emotions, including great empathy. She also maintains that without such people, humankind would descend into a “hedonistic hellscape.” In order to help such sensitive people thrive in a world that seldom values their complexity, Cangilla has developed her “Singularly Sensitive” approach with three main components: “explore” (which involves identifying one’s experiences), “experiment” (trying out new behaviors and thought patterns), and integrate (adding the results of these actions to one’s approach to life). The author expresses awareness that such an approach can seem naïve in a world in which sensitive people are constantly bombarded, but she draws on more than 20 years of psychology experience while assuring readers that it is effective. She makes a spirited case by touching on her own struggles with sensitivity and in a series of insights on ways to surmount the chaos of a less-sensitive world. That said, several of the “Singularly Sensitive” prompts take the form of clichés: “Deserts need water to unleash the life potential within them. What waters your inherent hope, creativity, and commitment to blossoming?” Nonetheless, the cheerful sincerity of the approach is bound to be helpful to some sensitive readers.
A concise and heartfelt series of encouragements.Pub Date: April 1, 2023
ISBN: 979-8988025313
Page Count: 131
Publisher: Singularly Sensitive Press
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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