Readers willing to wade through the textbook-style prose will be convinced of this subject's importance.
To the question, “Can intelligence be raised?” a resounding “Yes!”
Martinez (1956–2012) spent some 30 years researching intelligence, most recently in the education department at the University of California, Irvine. Before offering his ideas about how intelligence can be modified, he presents some necessary background material: the development of IQ tests, researchers’ understanding of the structure of intelligence and the current state of knowledge about external factors that can affect it, including nutrition, breast-feeding, toxins, home environment and family size. After touching on neuroscientists' and cognitive scientists' work on the brain and mind, Martinez looks further into the question of where intelligence comes from. He finds the answer in the work of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who asserted that social environment matters supremely. The major components of intelligence, in Martinez’s view, are fluid intelligence (the ability to deal with novel situations) and crystallized intelligence (the ability to master large bodies of information). These two, combined with effective character, are the keys to success in life. The author explores the ways in which these three factors interact synergistically to enhance intelligence and human effectiveness, then he turns to the question of how they can be improved. Martinez directs his strategies for modifying intelligence at individuals, parents, teachers, institutional leaders and world leaders. He offers some general techniques, but it would be a mistake to think of this exploration of intelligence as a handbook; its lessons are more fundamental. Concerned about the future of life on this planet, Martinez sends the message that solving the severe challenges that face us requires “a tremendous reserve of human intelligence, allied with wisdom and goodwill.”
Readers willing to wade through the textbook-style prose will be convinced of this subject's importance.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-19-978184-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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