An illuminating celebration of enveloping moments of being.
The author aims “not to chase mood, track it, or pin it down” but rather to “listen for it.”
In these captivating essays, which meld memoir, philosophical meditations, and reports from excursions far, deeply interior, and wide, Cappello (English and Creative Writing/Univ. of Rhode Island; Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them, 2010, etc.) explores the abstract, amorphous notion of mood: “a jagged conjunction of a furred creature of a feeling” that, she cautions, “cannot be explained.” Because moods are “personal and quirky,” Cappello ranges freely as she considers how moods are experienced, evoked, and changed. As a child, she noticed her father’s “perpetual mood,” which was sour, tortured, anxious: in a word, “lousy.” Happily for her, she did not inherit his predilection, but she notes her own variable moods, depending on what she is doing (looking through a View-Master, for example, whose “scenes invite the hue of some broken-off part of a mood”), hearing (sound and silence feature significantly in many essays), or reading (the picture books, for example, of Margaret Wise Brown). Cappello discovers in Brown’s Quiet Noisy Book a passage that seems to her the perfect definition of mood: “the sound of a person about to think.” Cappello also responds, moodily, to where she is, taking readers on a long, digressive journey to the L.C. Bates Museum in Maine, a crazy house of taxidermy, Orientalist esoterica, circus-model miniatures, ivory busts of famous figures, and assorted, seemingly valuable porcelain. “The world is out of joint and yet all the world’s conjoined, the carefully documented mishmash seems to say,” and it generated for her “a mood of madcap,” in stark contrast to the “mood of reverence that is the result of decorum, protocol, convention,” such as that found in a church. Cappello’s fresh inquisitiveness and surprising trains of thought may well remind readers of the ruminative writings of Adam Phillips or Alain de Botton.
An illuminating celebration of enveloping moments of being.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-226-35606-8
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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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