A compelling examination of how to find satisfaction in today’s working world.
Wysocki presents an interview-driven overview of the ups and downs of a wide variety of professions.
The author opens his nonfiction debut with a deceptively simple question: “Why are so many people unhappy” in their work life? His answer is equally simple: Those people didn’t actively choose their careers. Instead, he asserts, they drifted into them, letting opportunity—or, more specifically, market trends—guide them. The purpose of his book is to give readers a chance to find a career that resonates with them—to “clarify what calls to you.” Wysocki’s compelling approach provides readers with a series of detailed interviews with people, identified only by their first names and last initials, in a broad range of careers. These discussions are grouped under general headings, including “The Hustlers” (which include delivery people, truck drivers, farmers, and office managers), “The Einsteins” (software engineers, database developers, electrical engineers, and accountants), “The Good Kids” (ministers, social workers, and registered nurses), and “The Rock Stars” (writers, graphic designers, television producers, and, perhaps unexpectedly, English professors). The interview subjects are asked similar questions about how well their job pays, what they dislike about their work, what they see as common misconceptions about their job, and so on; regarding the latter, an archeologist mentions that his work involves a lot of tedious paperwork, for instance. Over the course of this survey, Wysocki shows himself to be highly skilled at assembling this material for practical use. He helpfully advises readers to skip straight to professions that interest them, but reading the book from cover to cover makes for a surprisingly gripping experience. Its optimistic tone, too, may strike some readers as unexpected; time and again, in profession after profession, responders report that they’re truly fulfilled by their job and wouldn’t change it, thus demonstrating to readers that satisfying careers really do exist.
A compelling examination of how to find satisfaction in today’s working world.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2023
ISBN: 9781634895743
Page Count: 568
Publisher: Wise Ink Creative Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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