by Tara Parker-Pope ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2001
Cigarette fans and foes alike will find something useful in these pages.
A journalistic portrait, alternately affectionate and damning, of the world’s favorite weed.
Parker-Pope admits to having been a social smoker, one who shrugged off the budding habit when she entered her first no-smoking newsroom in the mid-1980s. “Most smokers,” she writes, “aren’t so lucky. Only 10 percent of smokers can take it or leave it. That means 90 percent of the people who use cigarettes are addicts.” Her tale of how the cigarette evolved from a staple of the 19th-century proletariat and soldiery to a global business is full of fascinating tidbits. One is the sheer enormity of the industry, which now produces an estimated 5.5 trillion cigarettes each year (or a thousand cigarettes for every person on the planet). At a going price of more than $2.75 a pack, that adds up to a pile of money, some of which fuels an entire sub-economy of lawyers (18 percent of that price goes to pay the legal bills for recent multibillion-dollar class-action lawsuits against the tobacco companies), and much of which ends up in the coffers of the state (in the form of taxes). The fact that tobacco is now an important source of government revenue, she suggests, is only one reason why cigarettes are not immediately outlawed—smoking is too much a part of modern culture to be so easily uprooted, and “when the smoke clears from the tobacco wars, the last man (or woman) standing may well be a smoker with a cigarette in his (or her) mouth.” Parker-Pope is occasionally careless; she attributes the glamorization of smoking among women to one Betty—not Bette—Davis, and her numbers don’t always add up. Still, her argument is intriguing, and her study makes a fine light-touch companion to Stanton Glantz’s monumental Cigarette Papers (1996).
Cigarette fans and foes alike will find something useful in these pages.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56584-503-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011
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
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BOOK REVIEW
by Erin Meyer ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 27, 2014
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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