A rich, sophisticated argument that may leave pious souls a little uneasy.
The well-published MIT cognitive scientist and linguist (How the Mind Works, 1997, etc.) takes on one of philosophy’s thorniest problems in this lucid view of what makes humans human.
Against scholars and ideologues of the left and right, Pinker offers a profoundly biological view of human nature, even if his descriptions of what make us tick sometimes sound as if they’re straight out of a software manual. Pinker describes the brain, for instance, as a set of data-processing modules, “with many parts cooperating to generate a train of thought or an organized action. It has distinct information-processing systems for filtering out distractions, learning skills, controlling the body, remembering facts, holding information temporarily, and storing and executing rules.” Far from a tabula rasa, the brain is hard-wired with genetic information millennia old, governing our responses to events: altruism here, perhaps, or violence there. Psychologists believe that the human personality is variable in only five general dimensions, each governed by genetics: “we are to varying degrees introverted or extroverted, neurotic or stable, incurious or open to experience, agreeable or antagonistic, and conscientious or undirected.” (A shy, neurotic, agoraphobic, narcissistic, and wholly unreliable person, then, can take comfort in blaming his or her unpleasant makeup on generations of ancestors.) The implications of the biological view are many and large, and thus are the subject of fierce debate: if we are but a set of electrochemical circuits heavily programmed to behave according to a simple set of rules, then free choice and moral responsibility go out the window. Yet, Pinker remarks before examining the political and philosophical consequences of this position, “Nothing prevents the godless and amoral process of natural selection from evolving a big-brained social species equipped with an elaborate moral sense”—perhaps too much moral sense, he adds. His conclusions won’t please exponents of several camps, Christian conservatives and what he calls “gender feminists” among them, but he ably defends his ground, and with a minimum of jargon and scholarly sophistry.
A rich, sophisticated argument that may leave pious souls a little uneasy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03151-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
So good, so vitally important, but so . . . depressing.
A reader’s guide to depression, hopelessly bleak yet heartbreakingly real.
In this massive tome, Solomon (A Stone Boat, 1994, etc.) confronts the terrors of depression with a breadth both panoramic and precise. The 12 tersely titled chapters (“Depression,” “Breakdowns,” “Treatments,” “Alternatives,” “Populations,” “Addiction,” “Suicide,” “History,” “Poverty,” “Politics,” “Evolution,” and “Hope”) address with spectacular clarity the ways in which depression steals lives away, leaving its prey bereft of their very selves. Despite the occasional cliché (“Life is fraught with sorrows”) and heavy metaphor (“Grief is a humble angel”), Solomon’s prose illuminates a dark topic through the unfolding tales of his sources and his own life story; by allowing the voices of those who battle depression to speak, rich and varied pictures of daily struggle, defeat, and triumph ultimately emerge. The author deserves kudos as well both for the geographical span of his account (which ranges from Senegal to Greenland) and for its historical sweep (which begins with Hippocrates and continues to the present). Paradoxically, the completeness of Solomon’s vision undermines his readability: so much suffering fills these pages that, at times, it’s all a bit too much darkness. (The gruesome litany of suicide techniques, for example, seems gratuitous.) Nevertheless, the importance of the work becomes virtually self-evident when Solomon addresses such topics as the cultural denial of depression, masculine fears of seeking treatment, strengths and weaknesses of various treatments, the salutary effect of diet and exercise on depression, the high cost of treatment, and chronic depression among the elderly. Fortunately the final chapter is “Hope”—for the reader will certainly be in need of some after the marathon of gloom.
So good, so vitally important, but so . . . depressing.Pub Date: June 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-85466-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
A scholarly, demanding work—aptly described by its author as a ``strange, unorthodox book''—that examines the complex interaction between psychotherapy and culture by placing American psychotherapy within the context of the nation's larger history. Cushman (History/California School of Professional Psychology), a psychotherapist in private practice in northern California, sees American psychotherapy as a cultural artifact rather than a universal truth. To understand it, he looks closely at its historical antecedents, economic components, and political consequences, examining the 19th-century world into which psychotherapy was born and then showing how it has developed since 1900. The asylum movement, Freud's theories of the unconscious, mesmerism, and the interpersonal psychiatry of Harry Stack Sullivan are all covered. However, Cushman pays closest attention to the theories of Melanie Klein, asserting that her ideas about the inborn psychic structure of the self paved the way for new psychoanalytic theories emphasizing self-development and freedom that conformed to the social trends of the second half of the 20th century. The author argues that the post-World War II era has been marked by a pervasive sense of personal emptiness and a commitment to self-liberation through consumerism. While psychotherapy's role is to treat the unhappy effects of this emptiness, Cushman believes that its philosophy of individualism and emphasis on the self have in fact reinforced consumerism. The task now, he says, is to replace this solipsistic configuration with a new, socially cooperative and morally superior one, and he urges psychotherapists to become actively involved in this process. To promote the necessary dialogue, Cushman includes an appendix describing some of the many alternative configurations of the self that have existed during the past 2,500 years of Western civilization. A deeply moral work that engages, informs, and persuades- -recommended to anyone concerned about the evolving American psyche.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-201-62643-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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