Too much pop and not enough psychology.
How unscrupulous political leaders turn people into sheep and make them bleat on cue.
Stout has mined for pop-psychology gold in earlier works (The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us, 2005, etc.), and her prose has softened in proportion as her apparent resolve to become Dr. Phil has hardened. Her thesis here is simple: As creatures, we are naturally subject to fear, individually and collectively, but if we know who the Bad Guys are (here: the Bush administration) and what they are doing to us, we can defeat them by following her prescriptions—e.g., “Make fun of the [frightening] image. If you enjoy irony, yell, The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!” Stout’s approach at times seems lifted from a self-help magazine in a supermarket checkout line. Are you stressed? Find out with her 21-question “Walking-Around Anxiety Test” (“7. Right now, are your palms sweaty?”). Later, she identifies “Six Stages of a Limbic War” and lists “Ten Behavioral Characteristics of Fear Brokers.” She equates political leaders who frighten us with domestic abusers and offers a sugary case study of an abused woman who found the Courage to Be Free after spending some quality time with Martha Stout, Ph.D. The author is most effective when she explains the physiological and psychological mechanisms of individual and cultural fear. Her discussion of the limbic system is clear, as are her descriptions of our coping mechanisms. She shows how irrational fears led to events as diverse as the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, the Red-baiting of the McCarthy era, the Patriot Act and the arrest of Cat Stevens. She cites some research that indicates our Blue State/Red State political preferences may be hard-wired, and she elicits a chuckle with her concept of a “cowbird politician”: a public official who has no core beliefs but employs the “nests” of others.
Too much pop and not enough psychology.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-374-22999-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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