An often masterful hybrid of self-help and firsthand history.
Haas (Dakini Power, 2013) offers a combination of science reportage, memoir, and advice on the subject of trauma.
The book opens with a difficult question: why are some people resilient in the face of misfortune, while others struggle? After acquiring a mysterious virus in Tibet that demolished her health, Haas returned to France, where her spouse lived, and began a drawn-out process of physical and mental renewal. That journey led to this volume investigating “the science of posttraumatic growth” via interviews with people who persisted through pain. Among the interview subjects are Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen, who continued a successful career after losing his left arm in a car accident; autistic scientist Temple Grandin, whose father wanted to abandon her as a child; and military medic Rhonda Cornum, who survived a helicopter crash during Operation Desert Storm in Iraq. Haas assimilates these conversations into a structured but flowing discussion of the nature and social perception of trauma and recovery. Drawing on her interviewees’ insights as well as her own experiences with Buddhist meditative practices, she makes a thorough case that what counts as trauma can vary greatly from person to person, that overly narrow clinical definitions can be detrimental to healing and progress, and, most importantly, that trauma can help people adapt in radically new ways. She recounts a story that Richard Tedeschi, a scientist at the forefront of research on posttraumatic growth, told her about a man with terminal cancer who was more preoccupied with his past divorce—a tale that shows that trauma can take many, often surprising, forms. If hardship resists generalization, the author seems to say, so do the effective ways that one can respond to it. Haas unifies her subjects’ differing responses to catastrophe with the idea that, somehow, they all transformed difficult plights into valuable opportunities. She also peppers the book with practical tips, some better than others, and includes a meditation guide.
An often masterful hybrid of self-help and firsthand history.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1512-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Enliven/Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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