An elegantly written memoir of a lifelong struggle with mental illness.
The promise—and peril—of books.
Though she attempted suicide three times between the ages of 10 and 18, Chihaya writes, “One thing I was pretty sure about [the term] ‘nervous breakdown’ was that it was not for people like me.” The child of a Japanese immigrant and a Japanese Canadian woman who “didn’t really believe in the concept of mental health,” she diagnosed her adult self as “a self-harm hobbyist, a casual insomniac, and a nonchalant bulimic,” rather than someone seriously distressed. Dark humor like this slightly leavens the grim mood as Chihaya delineates her intense and in her judgment often harmful relationship with books. “I was always reading for something,” she comments, “for validation, for comprehension…and always, secretly, for salvation.” Only after her inability to write the academic monograph required for academic tenure prompted a full-fledged collapse was she forced to acknowledge her precarious emotional state. Her probing and wrenchingly honest memoir looks back on books that affected her powerfully in various ways, from Toni Morrison’s terrifying The Bluest Eye, which voiced her teenage fears of failing to measure up to “all the provinces of whiteness,” to Ruth Ozeki’s reassuring A Tale for the Time Being, read while she was an anxious assistant professor, which “kicked up my faith in a book that could save me.” At times, Chihaya’s analysis of the effect certain books had on her is so minute it becomes wearying, and her many definitions of bibliophobia—“acute, literal fear of books,” “violent fits of melancholy and resentment after finishing a book,” “superstitious fear of incompletion,” and more—make her explanation that “bibliophobia is many things” seem like nervous justification. Nonetheless, she offers an intriguing alternate view of passionate reading, and the closing pages movingly describe Chihaya coming to terms with the fact that she will always be a suicide risk. The book offers more than some readers will want to know, but it’s probing and wrenchingly honest.
An elegantly written memoir of a lifelong struggle with mental illness.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593594728
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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