An eye-opening look at how young survivors of wartime trauma can achieve postwar success.
The toll of war on the young.
Rebel armies abducted both boys and girls in the Sierra Leone Civil War, which inflicted tens of thousands of casualties and displaced more than 2 million people between 1991 and 2002. Some bore arms, others took roles as scouts, scavengers, cooks, or any other task their captors ordained. Extreme violence—including execution for minor offenses—and sexual abuse were commonplace, and many of the girls became pregnant. Not surprisingly, they encountered obstacles when returning to civilian life—PTSD, bullying and teasing at school, rejection by families and neighbors. After the war, Betancourt, then a Ph.D. student at Harvard, went to Sierra Leone to study how the survivors were adapting. Now a professor at Boston College, she tells some of their stories, as well as the stories of those who tried to help them become healthy, productive citizens. Not all succeeded. Many of the boys joined gangs or became drug addicts; many of the girls turned to sex work to support themselves and their own children. Those who escaped these traps usually did so with the support of their families and communities. Those working to help the survivors reintegrate found success by persuading family and respected elders to give the survivors support. Still, the programs were impeded by inadequate funding and staffing—there are only three practicing psychiatrists in the entire country—and by a traditional culture that stigmatized mental illness. General readers may find some of the text slow going because of technical jargon, but the story as a whole is inspiring. A bonus for many readers will be the close-up view of Sierra Leone, a country few Americans know well.
An eye-opening look at how young survivors of wartime trauma can achieve postwar success.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780674251052
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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