A confused and overstuffed tale of psychological illness and recovery.
A young man’s traumatic failures in love drive him to madness in this debut book.
As a child, Tom was a favorite target of bullies—fearful and submissive, as well as set apart by social awkwardness. It didn’t help that his parents had a wildly tumultuous relationship that ended in an acrimonious divorce, or that his older sister dismissively rejected him in favor of her cooler friends. And like any adolescent boy, Tom is drawn romantically to his co-ed contemporaries but also chronically spurned, leaving him “maladjusted, alienated, lonely, depressed, and suffering from low self-esteem.” He attends the University of Maine and falls in love with Lisa, but she doesn’t return his affections, and clearly only keeps him around to cruelly bolster her own sense of self-worth. Now dejected from a lack of social success, he opts to spend the summer with his aunt and uncle in Arizona; there he meets another girl—Mary—and falls madly in love with her. When she too fails to reciprocate his affections, he starts to lose his grip on reality, battered from yet another bout of rejection, and eventually seeks the counsel of anyone willing to help—his professor, a therapist, and a hypnotist are among those to whom he turns. Tom overdoses on anti-psychotic medication and lands in a psychiatric institution, grappling with his festering obsession over a girl he hardly dated and barely knew. Doran intends this to be a thinly fictionalized memoir written in the third person of his own scramble for mental peace. The descriptions of Tom’s afflictions are insistently clinical—the book begins and ends with notes from the author’s former therapist, explaining, in the driest academic language imaginable, the psychological import of the story. Doran also repeatedly describes Tom’s plight in diagnostic language, apparently anxious that readers might draw their own conclusions. In addition, the prose at times hyperventilates. For example, Tom anguishes over a girl’s attention: “She is gazing at me. The angel is gazing at me. She’s gazing. Gazing! She’s gazing at me. What does it mean? What could it mean? Do I dare hope?” Of course, Tom’s (and the author’s) victory over mental illness remains unfathomably inspiring, but there’s more to readable fiction than inspiration.
A confused and overstuffed tale of psychological illness and recovery.Pub Date: May 7, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 527
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
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.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
