A discerning history of the quest for self-knowledge.
An illuminating dual biography of two women who invented a hugely popular personality test.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is still widely used by businesses, schools, churches, and the military. Although it has no scientific credibility, it incited a vogue for self-assessment questionnaires proliferating in popular magazines, online dating sites, and self-help books, offering a means of “self-discovery as a civilizing form of self-mastery.” Los Angeles Review of Books senior humanities editor Emre (English/Oxford Univ.; Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, 2017, etc.) has dug deeply into published and archival sources to produce a deft, gracefully written account of Katharine Briggs (1875-1968) and her daughter, Isabel Myers (1897-1980), ardent devotees of Carl Jung who created, tested, and promoted a lengthy questionnaire that, they insisted, revealed an individual’s true, innate, unchanging personality type. Influenced by Jung’s Psychological Types (1921), they devised a rubric that identified personality according to four “easy to understand and easily relatable” categories: extravert or introvert, thinking or feeling, sensing or intuiting, judging or perceiving. Katharine’s early interest in personality shaped her “Obedience-Curiosity” method of raising her daughter: Disobedience was punished by slaps and drills, obedience rewarded by stories, and curiosity encouraged—as long as it did not lead to disobedience. Occasionally, Isabel attended school, although Katharine derided the “rapidly democratizing public-school system.” Katharine’s unconventional method attracted enough attention that she was asked to write magazine articles expounding on child-rearing advice. By 1923, with her daughter grown and married, Katharine sank into depression, alleviated by her discovery of Jung, for whom she developed an intense, even erotic, passion. As she delved into his work, she came to believe “that knowing one’s type could save the soul of an individual while prompting him to assume the specialized offices that would help him advance civilization.” Emre traces the intersection of the Briggs-Myers inventory with widespread interest in personality that involved prominent psychologists, sociologists, businessmen, college admissions officers, and researchers eager to find tools for measuring character and capability.
A discerning history of the quest for self-knowledge.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-385-54190-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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