A compassionate psychological page-turner.
Clark (Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture, 2007) examines how people react under pressure.
The author sets the stage with a nail-biting account of a potentially cataclysmic event during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when a highly stressed Soviet submarine commander almost made the fatal mistake of shooting off a nuclear-armed torpedo. Even though he was afflicted with debilitating anxiety attacks, the author was still surprised to learn that anxiety disorders now top the list of mental disorders in the United States, exceeding depression. While anti-anxiety medications help ameliorate symptoms, Clark wanted to get to the root of the problem. His search for answers as to why many of us “fret about things that are, for lack of a better word, bullshit,” yet others—including police officers, pilots and trauma surgeons—manage to successfully circumvent the brain's flight-fight-or-freeze response to perceived threats takes him on a fascinating quest for understanding. He first looks at neurological studies of the brain, which provide insight into how it can be trained to distinguish between real and apparent threats and deal with crisis situations by repeatedly evoking fear and working through it. Clark interviews a wide variety of people, including athletes who inexplicably choke in tight situations and others who appear at the top of their game when the pressure is most intense. The author also discusses World War II, when Londoners calmly weathered nightly German bombing raids—after a while they became predictable and therefore less frightening—while soldiers crumbled under sporadic artillery fire. During the writing of this book, Clark learned to face his own fears and function effectively. He recognized that feeling fear and keeping cool in stressful situations are not incompatible but often complementary.
A compassionate psychological page-turner.Pub Date: March 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-04289-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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