“To reshape the future we need first to better understand and reshape ourselves,” writes Whybrow, and he offers a running...
Whybrow (Director, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior/UCLA; American Mania: When More Is Not Enough, 2005) addresses significant issues related to the navigation toward a more meaningful life.
Many of society’s current plagues—obesity, debt, stress, etc.—find their sources in three areas: instinctual strivings for short-term rewards, our habit-driven brains, and the affluence of contemporary culture. The problem, as Ogden Nash neatly put it in 1971, is that “progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.” Relic, habit, and circumstance have created the perfect storm to wash away much of our better selves: our senses of measure, self-control, empathy, and thoughtful decision-making. Whybrow rightly recognizes the nature-nurture complexity of why our behavior has been derailed. Our intuition (“reflexive self-knowledge based on implicitly learned, social habits of mind”) has shed its deliberate, reflective qualities, and when it comes to choice, we are opportunists. The author digs deep into economic theory—primarily Adam Smith and the necessity of moral obligation—and psychology and a variety of social fields, easily handling complex topics. While Whybrow’s storytelling is entertaining, it falls shy of the sophistication that would give the unspoken science more palpability. When he launches into some basic cures, however, he bracingly calls on our better selves to wake up. “The genetic prescription we each carry,” he writes, “does not alone determine our destiny: but the interaction of that prescription with family, culture, and experience certainly does.” Whybrow’s crisp neuroscience reporting is important, as it helps us understand why parts of the brain are at war, some busy offering rewards and reinforcement, others cross-talking, all the while being stressed and pulled by environment. “The ecology of the family is a multitude of sympathetic, synergistic, and symbiotic interactions,” the author astutely points out. “Personal freedom and individual responsibility are forged…within this ecology.”
“To reshape the future we need first to better understand and reshape ourselves,” writes Whybrow, and he offers a running start.Pub Date: May 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-07292-1
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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