An optimistic, cleareyed call for people to reconnect with their imaginative urges.
A wide-ranging inquiry into the wellsprings of human creativity.
Tucker’s book starts during his boyhood years in Africa, looking up at the unspoiled night sky from the middle of the Botswanan bushveld and feeling a surge of wonder at the grandeur and mystery of it all. The author views this inner restlessness as fundamental to the human experience. “That’s the point: we human beings don’t leave anything to their own devices,” he writes. “We control, we influence, we change, we bend and even break, and at our very best, we create.” The bulk of his book considers creativity and art and their various origins and patterns. Art ignores neat, definitive answers, he writes; rather, it’s a reflection of the primordial human desire to extract order from chaos. As Tucker elaborates, that desire itself can be incredibly complicated, verging everywhere from feelings of inadequacy to the gnawings of envy to the desire to oversimplify. “Applying labels and placing things in neat boxes is always reductive,” he writes, and the real remedy for envy is a greater peace with one’s own accomplishments. “If you’ve been dangling the ‘promise of guaranteed success’ in front of yourself as motivation,” he writes, “I hope you can find a way to replace it with ‘pride in your work’ as the reason to keep going and doing the very best you can.” In clear, often compelling prose, Tucker asks his readers a series of deceptively simple questions: What do you make? And what constitutes a reward for what you make? He urges his readers to recall their earliest experiences of producing their art—before the corrosive expectations of others existed, when there was only the excitement of trying new things. And because Tucker has chosen a narrative tone of open encouragement not tied to any particular creative school or philosophical outlook, his call for that type of inner renewal will likely reach a wide range of readers.
An optimistic, cleareyed call for people to reconnect with their imaginative urges.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68198-723-1
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Rocky Nook
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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