A passionate, often counterintuitive, disturbingly convincing addition to the why-people-believe-stupid-things genre.
According to this ingenious and unsettling account, deception is essential to our well-being.
Vedantam and Mesler note that when we ask an acquaintance, “how are you?” we usually don’t want an honest answer—and don’t get one. If you don’t believe in Santa Claus or the second coming, it’s because “your life does not depend on your believing such things.” However, if matters took a turn for the worse, you might reconsider. “There are no atheists in foxholes” is a cliché but not entirely false. The authors emphasize that evolution did not design our brain to seek the truth but to survive. Seeking the truth is beside the point. Depressed people often see the world more realistically. Deception, including self-deception write the authors, “enables us to accomplish useful social, psychological, or biological goals. Holding false beliefs is not always the mark of idiocy, pathology, or villainy.” Much of the book recounts often squirm-inducing examples to prove the case. For example, in the late 1980s, a group called the “Church of Love” sent affectionate form letters from purportedly distressed young women to lonely men, many of whom engaged in extensive correspondence and sent money, not always when requested. At the leader’s trial, many victims, despite knowing the facts, fervently defended him. Digging deeper, the authors examine American patriotism and how our collective “national fictions give us a shared sense of identity and purpose, the cohesion to accomplish great things, the will and capability to defend ourselves against mortal threats.” The authors also examine the concept of the placebo, which in certain cases is “the most benevolent of lies,” and they defend their position that optimists with fatal diseases live longer than “realists,” quoting studies that show this and ignoring those that show the opposite.
A passionate, often counterintuitive, disturbingly convincing addition to the why-people-believe-stupid-things genre.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-393-65220-8
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
An unflinching self-portrait.
The tumultuous life of a bisexual, autistic comic.
In her debut memoir, Scottish comedian Brady recounts the emotional turmoil of living with undiagnosed autism. “The public perception of autistics is so heavily based on the stereotype of men who love trains or science,” she writes, “that many women miss out on diagnosis and are thought of as studious instead.” She was nothing if not studious, obsessively focused on foreign languages, but she found it difficult to converse in her own language. From novels, she tried to gain “knowledge about people, about how they spoke to each other, learning turns of phrase and metaphor” that others found so familiar. Often frustrated and overwhelmed by sensory overload, she erupted in violent meltdowns. Her parents, dealing with behavior they didn’t understand—including self-cutting—sent her to “a high-security mental hospital” as a day patient. Even there, a diagnosis eluded her; she was not accurately diagnosed until she was 34. Although intimate friendships were difficult, she depicts her uninhibited sexuality and sometimes raucous affairs with both men and women. “I grew up confident about my queerness,” she writes, partly because of “autism’s lack of regard for social norms.” While at the University of Edinburgh, she supported herself as a stripper. “I liked that in a strip club men’s contempt of you was out in the open,” she admits. “In the outside world, misogyny was always hovering in your peripheral vision.” When she worked as a reporter for the university newspaper, she was assigned to try a stint as a stand-up comic and write about it; she found it was work she loved. After “about a thousand gigs in grim little pubs across England,” she landed an agent and embarked on a successful career. Although Brady hopes her memoir will “make things feel better for the next autistic or misfit girl,” her anger is as evident as her compassion.
An unflinching self-portrait.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780593582503
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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