Informative, entertaining, and enlightening research and personal reflections on the multifaceted ways children change a...
An intriguing perspective on the permanent physical and emotional changes a woman experiences after giving birth.
There are countless books on the physical and emotional fluctuations women experience as they go through pregnancy, but far fewer delve into how those same transformations affect a woman long after the birth of her child. Millwood (Psychology/Saint Michael’s Coll.), a clinical psychologist who focuses on marital therapy and intimate relationships, expertly combines research and her personal story into a book that she wished she could have read during her struggles as a new mother. The author discusses how postpartum depression can affect a woman years after giving birth, how the stress caused by lack of sleep is prevalent yet not often discussed, and how the body keeps the memories of trauma embedded in its cells, which can resurface unexpectedly and at odd moments. Throughout, Millwood shares her own journey as a mother, from the elation of being pregnant to the reality that sometimes things got boring while nursing or running after her toddler, with no adult interaction for hours at a time. She explores the shame and guilt women feel for not being as happy as they anticipated with their new child, often exacerbated by the loss of personal freedom and spontaneity. Millwood also relates how having a child can affect women’s marriages and/or long-term relationships. Women are often upset at the apparent lack of sacrifices made by their significant others when comparing their before-child life to their post-child life—not to mention the burden placed on mothers to know everything about caring for a child, with the spouse in the role of helper instead of equal partner in all duties and responsibilities. Mothers who are struggling to accept their new role have a definite advocate in Millwood.
Informative, entertaining, and enlightening research and personal reflections on the multifaceted ways children change a person forever.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-283865-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper Wave
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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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