Revealing glimpses, sometimes amusing, sometimes appalling, of a world where spirits are accepted as a part of everyday life.
An American doctor who served as a government psychiatrist for the Zimbabwe Ministry of Health draws on his clinical experiences to create a beguiling account of culture shock in a hospital setting.
Linde, an emergency psychiatrist at San Francisco General Hospital, was no stranger to the interconnectedness of mind, body, and spirit in April 1994, when his search for personal fulfillment led him to Harare General’s psychiatric unit. Eager to understand the role played by spirits in the lives of his beleaguered patients, he immersed himself in the belief system of the Shona people. Linde knew that families often brought members to him as a last resort after failed treatment by a traditional Shona healer, who treated for bewitchment by ancestor spirits, or an evangelical Christian healer, who used exorcism rituals to counter demonic possession. While sensitive to the cultural beliefs of the Shona, which included the notion that mental illness was contagious, Linde nevertheless followed a Western approach to treatment of his patients. Besides AIDS-related dementia, psychoses, schizophrenia, and depression, he was called on to treat “kufungisisa,” or “thinking too much,” a condition many Shona believed could be caused by supernatural factors. In one especially bizarre case, he concluded that a young man who asserted that he was bewitched, was actually inserting needles and nails into his own leg to protect his community from the punishment he feared it would suffer for his crime of killing an owl. Linde’s clinical successes were limited, given his scarce resources and the extreme poverty he faced, and he returned to the US after a year. These accounts, written several years later, disguise the identities of his patients or are composites. An exception is the eleventh and final one, featuring a composed young man whose mindset the author especially admires but is unable to emulate.
Revealing glimpses, sometimes amusing, sometimes appalling, of a world where spirits are accepted as a part of everyday life.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-07-136734-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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