This slim volume includes two extended essays, incisive and conversational, that have plenty of connections between them.
Both “Dream Life” and “Seeing Things” were previously published in different form, but they complement each other as if they were two sides of the coin of the unconscious, the former focusing on dreams and how they work and what they mean, the latter illuminating a rare (or is it?) perception disorder that serves as a more general metaphor. As a writer (of fiction and memoir) and teacher of writing, Herman (Dog, 2005, etc.) confesses that she isn’t a specialist in these areas, that she has a “lack of expertise, paired with plenty of ideas…that combination of knowing little and having theories and opinions about much.” Yet her opinions are often revelatory and help her overcome the challenge that is central to the first and longer essay, that “nobody wants to hear anybody else’s dreams; everyone wants to tell his dreams to somebody.” So even as readers are threatened with drowning in details about the author’s dream of her grandmother, such specifics lead to the universal understanding that “understanding one’s dreams is more like reading Wallace Stevens—or looking at a painting of Mark Rothko’s—than it is like the one-to-one correlation…of translation. To make ‘sense’ of our dreams, we don’t interpret them so much as we feel our way through them.” The second essay proceeds from the way her daughter occasionally sees things (and her mother in particular) as much smaller or larger than they really are. What initially seems rare, even unique, turns out to be surprisingly common, as so many with whom they share this experience say that they, too, have had it and thought they were the only one. It even has a name: “Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.” Eventually, the author realizes that there are “no experts when it comes to the way our minds work. It turns out that your guess really is as good as mine—or as good as a neurobiologist’s.” An engaging companion offers a spirit of shared humanity.
Pub Date: March 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60938-153-0
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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
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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