A well-researched, abundantly documented, readable work of social science.
Probing the nature of resilience through the stories behind the people who thrive in adversity.
Researchers define resilience as “achieving success despite serious challenges.” However, as Jay (Clinical Psychology/Univ. of Virginia; The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How to Make the Most of Them Now, 2012, etc.) shows, resilience encompasses behaviors that make it a far more complex phenomenon. Drawing on the personal stories of famous people and her own clients, the author insightfully explores how that apparent invincibility masks other, more painful realities. Like Superman, the comic book hero, “supernormals” are ordinary people forced by circumstance to overcome extreme adversity. Marilyn Monroe, for example, escaped life as a foster child to become a Hollywood legend. Yet she paid a heavy personal price that included self-doubt and bouts with depression. In examining the unsung lives of more ordinary supernormals, Jay reveals some of the tactics they use to survive their particular circumstances. Her client Paul, a nuclear engineer and naval officer and former victim of childhood bullying, channeled anger into vigorous intellectual and physical pursuits. Mara, who lived with a bipolar mother, sought spaces within her mind and in the world outside her home where she could find temporary respite. Jessie learned how to cope with a physically abusive sibling by becoming hypervigilant and treating her life like a “chess game.” Yet because supernormals spend so much time honing their coping mechanisms, they often leave other parts of themselves underdeveloped. In particular, many find it difficult to form lasting and/or close relationships with others. As a result, they may live with “incredible alienation” that stands in the way of their forming loving bonds that could save them. In the end, the true “battle between good and bad” that supernormals face is not with hostile people and/or environments: it is with themselves. Jay’s book is both compelling and hopeful. She amply shows that though internal battles may not end, the joy that comes from living a balanced life is always possible.
A well-researched, abundantly documented, readable work of social science.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4555-5915-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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