So, smart steps in the right direction, good cross-species comparisons, but a way to go.
Psychologist La Cerra and biologist Bingham unfold their version of what makes us unique.
“Unfold” is the word, since their approach is developmental. A baby is neither a tabula rasa nor a full-fledged persona but engaged in survival using instinct, sensory experience, and feedback. In this, babies are hardly different from bacteria, whose more primitive “minds” enable them to move toward food or tumble randomly, or from bees, coding color, shape, and scent to record which flowers are best. Now comes the jargon: thus individuals build “adaptive representational networks” (ARNS), which include the mental “snapshot” of a particular behavior associated with a successful outcome (raid fridge, satisfy hunger). Intersecting these myriad ARNS are Life History Regulatory Systems—your part genetic, part environmentally induced life stages—childhood to adolescence to reproductive years, and beyond. Since everyone’s experiences are unique, the self is unique, and the invoking of chance, environmental vagaries, language, and learning are both hope and guarantee that the self can be re-calibrated—made over by changing the inputs (as in AA and other 12-step programs). There is even a suggestion that some serious affective states such as depression and manic-depression are ways of re-calibrating—a kind of coping mechanism that unfortunately goes too far. By the end, though, one senses that this constructivist approach—a bootstrap building of the self—is too pat. There is more to human behavior than ARNS, LHRS’s, and “behavioral intelligence.” And while the arguments here to counter the dogmas of evolutionary psychology are sound, the authors’ claims that their new theory of the self shares some of the best insights of Freud, Skinner, and Maslow seem like so much back-patting.
So, smart steps in the right direction, good cross-species comparisons, but a way to go.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-609-60558-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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