Will not convince the cynical or pessimistic among us, but for those who already engage in hopeful thinking, Lopez offers...
A leading authority on the psychology of hope shares the secret of how to achieve a happier and more successful future.
Hope, writes Gallup senior scientist Lopez (The Encyclopedia of Positive Psychology, 2009, etc.), is a more dynamic concept than just wishful thinking; it is the ability to imagine a future goal and understand the steps necessary to accomplish it. The author uses many examples from his personal life, research and clients to demonstrate his argument that hope not only changes one’s outlook on the future, but also helps to shape it. Lopez begins with the example of John, a farmer who had become suicidal after being diagnosed with kidney disease. By focusing on the jobs that needed to be done around the farm, Lopez helped John to “futurecast”—to envision a future of his making. This exercise improved John’s emotional state and allowed him to delay dialysis as his kidneys started to improve. Lopez tends toward the sentimental in his examples: the young girl who survived two heart transplants and is now a successful college student; the entrepreneur, who, despite a failing economy, managed to keep his business afloat; the parents who turned around a failing school; the immigrant child who worked hard and found a future for himself that would have been unimaginable in his home country. These aren’t new or shocking narratives, and they often border on cliché. Yet, unlike some similarly themed self-help books, Lopez doesn’t claim that simply thinking something will make it so. Hope, by his definition, includes good, old-fashioned hard work.
Will not convince the cynical or pessimistic among us, but for those who already engage in hopeful thinking, Lopez offers positive reinforcement.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1451666229
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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
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