Jay combines therapeutic experience with personal insights, providing a wealth of guidance to those who most need it.
Caught between adolescence and maturity, twentysomethings are spiraling into crisis, argues a developmental clinical psychologist.
The time between the ages of 20 and 30 is often depicted as a time of freedom, experimentation, and personal growth. Jay, a clinical psychologist who specializes in this age group, disagrees. Her experience, which she bolsters with medical statistics, is that members of this demographic are likely to face depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and loneliness, and their common responses—to reach for therapy, medication, recreational drugs, or social media—often make their problems worse. They seem to have little idea about how to make friends and build relationships, and they’re constantly worried that any emotional connection will leave them hurt and scarred. They crave certainty, but as the author shows, that’s not going to happen. Jay has plenty of stories to illustrate her points, and she’s constantly surprised that the people she treats seem so unprepared for adult life. She covered some of this territory in an earlier book, The Defining Decade, and this book can be read as a follow-up concerned primarily with possible remedies. Even with her solid psychotherapy credentials, Jay’s focus is on non-medical solutions. She offers practical advice on developing social relationships, choosing a suitable job, finding a purpose, and even falling in love. Learning to cook—actual cooking, not throwing something into the microwave—is surprisingly beneficial. So is physical movement, whether it’s a dance class or a stroll around the block. The author also notes that readers should be prepared to accept some scrapes and bruises as essential parts of growing up. “Life is the best therapist of all,” Jay concludes, “and it is affordable, accessible, and right outside your door.”
Jay combines therapeutic experience with personal insights, providing a wealth of guidance to those who most need it.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781668012291
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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