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UNDER THE INFLUENCE

Name: UNDER THE INFLUENCE
Author: Rebecca Shannonhouse
ISBN: 0-375-75716-3

THE LITERATURE OF ADDICTION

edited by Rebecca Shannonhouse ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 11, 2003

A nice variety of perspectives on the pleasures and perils of excess.

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Diverse reflections on substance abuse and society in 23 sharply fashioned testimonies.

“What once was viewed as a shocking moral deficiency is now increasingly seen as a tragic vulnerability,” comments editor Shannonhouse (Out of Her Mind, 2000), who supports this assertion by selecting texts from both the addict’s point of view and that of society. Excerpts from Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) was one of the first accounts of Western drug use, and Sigmund Freud’s earnest inquiry, The Cocaine Papers, remind us that 19th-century society was fairly tolerant of controlled substance use. By contrast, in his 1891 essay on “The Ethics of Wine-Drinking and Tobacco-Smoking,” Leo Tolstoy argues persuasively (if verbosely) that “the universal habit of consuming hashish, opium, wine, and tobacco . . . is, beyond all doubt, highly pernicious [and] fraught with terrible evils.” Early-20th-century entries, including “How Children are Made Drunkards” and “The Enemy” (a 1909 tale of a woman’s morphine addiction), take an even more moralistic tone. Their lugubrious air is lightened by O. Henry’s barbed “Let Me Feel Your Pulse,” which transforms the cynical narrator’s alcoholism into hallucinatory prose, and by the mordant insider’s perspective offered in “A Bartender Tells What Man Did to Booze and Booze to Man.” Familiar pieces by literary figures include Dorothy Parker’s “Big Blonde,” John Cheever’s “The Sorrows of Gin,” and excerpts from Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs, and The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley. Not all the addictive behavior explored is chemical: in a selection from Double Down, Stephen and Frederick Barthelme ruefully chronicle runaway gambling, while a jagged excerpt of Sue Silverman’s memoir Love Sick dissects the sexual addict’s compulsion to sleep with strangers. In the final piece, “Confessions of a Middle-Aged Ecstasy Eater,” a lonely father reconnects with his delinquent son via the drug and rails against current punitive restrictions on adult pursuit of sensation and enlightenment.

A nice variety of perspectives on the pleasures and perils of excess.

Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2003

ISBN: 0-375-75716-3

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Modern Library

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY

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MASTERY

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...

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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

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY | SELF-HELP

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...

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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.