Unique, well-curated brain food for readers intrigued with the human psyche and how it can be recorded, indexed, and...
A detailed exploration of a historic, one-of-a-kind social archive project.
Lemov (History of Science/Harvard Univ.; World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men, 2005) diligently scrutinizes a long-lost collection of sociological data collected in the mid-20th century. Her excavation was a frustrating one, she notes, due to the data’s whereabouts and its availability, as well as the difficulty in accessing the machines required to view them. The author traces the histories of the many evaluative scientists fascinated with projective testing data in the early 1900s and the subsequent paper trail of diagnostic results in the wake of their human psychological evaluations. Capitalizing on this need to collect social-scientific data was anthropological researcher–turned–Harvard psychologist Bert Kaplan, whose pioneering societal experiments progressed from New Mexico’s Zuni Pueblo to the assemblage of dream data from Native American tribal subjects (augmenting the work of American anthropologist Dorothy Eggan). It also encompassed Rorschach tests, which often revealed the hidden personality traits of participants. All of these findings were then recorded through the then-innovative yet now-vastly-outdated Microcard archival and Readex retrieval system. In her comprehensive text, dense with detailed research and intelligent speculation, Lemov ably deconstructs how the possibility of an archive could even exist in the mid-1900s, why it was stored in the way that it was, how the hybridized data storage devices actually worked, and the way Kaplan’s professional modesty contributed to the eventual evaporation of his legendary project. In what she calls a “parable for our time,” Lemov notes that this database, however obscure, is a reflection on the nature and behavior of modern humanity within an increasingly digitized society.
Unique, well-curated brain food for readers intrigued with the human psyche and how it can be recorded, indexed, and cross-referenced.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-300-20952-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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