A useful and highly readable book of self-discipline and reflection.
Writer and speaker Cadsby’s treatise asserts that the very traits that set humans apart from animals also cause existential and behavioral disadvantages.
The author defines five “cognitive design features” of the human brain, which he says is optimized for the primal living conditions of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. These features, which include “We’re Greedy Reductionists” and “We’re Addicted to Certainty,” become flaws in the sociocultural context of 21st-century living. He expertly outlines why humans possess these reflexive, instinctive responses to stimuli and provides actionable tips and exercises for overcoming them by embracing what he calls “The Space Between”—a self-generated mental area that separates the knee-jerk “System 1” from his proposed metacognitive powerhouse, “System 2.” Cadsby notes the Buddhist notion that the human experience is predicated on suffering but asserts that “our ultimate freedom lies in our metacognitive ability to pause and reflect before we respond.” In these pages, he walks readers through the System 1 defaults, offering a mix of simple, concrete solutions and more labor-intensive mental exercises to help overcome them; the latter range from taking deep breaths to restructuring the way one approaches difficult decisions to ultimately redefining one’s search for meaning: “We are not designed to live free of existential anxiety,” he states, because, despite ourselves, “we are the species that ruminates, causing us no end of uniquely human suffering.” The book effectively doubles as a crash-course in philosophy, delving generally into the ideas of such foundational thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Carl Jung, Daniel Kahneman, and Steven Pinker. Cadsby does an excellent job summarizing and making connections between interrelated philosophies and subsequently grounding his own assertions on these theories to construct a consistent and cohesive game plan. Although his conclusions and techniques may not be new, his presentation is creative and informative, restructuring classic ideas into accessible advice.
A useful and highly readable book of self-discipline and reflection.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4597-4884-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dundurn
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
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