Depression and anxiety are at epidemic levels; this book offers an alternative path to a fulfilling, productive life.
A social psychologist shows how perfectionism can hold you back from real achievement and points the way out of the dilemma.
Curran, a psychology professor at the London School of Economics, shows how we are experiencing record levels of burnout, hypercompetitiveness, depression, and anxiety. The reason, he argues, is perfectionism, an impulse that runs through everything from work to personal attractiveness. It is relentless, impossible to satisfy, and inherently dangerous to mental well-being. Curran examines it from various perspectives and provides a self-diagnostic tool called the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale. Many perfectionists think of themselves as highly productive, but that belief is not supported by the evidence. In fact, perfectionists often repeat the same task over and over again rather than looking for innovations and alternatives. They can also be intolerant of others, which is disruptive in the workplace and in relationships. Still, perfectionism is ubiquitous. We are constantly bombarded with messages telling us to be better, strive harder, and consume more. The filtered, glossy images of social media set impossible standards that cannot be met, although some people go to enormous lengths in attempts to do so. Curran offers solid suggestions on how to avoid the perfection impulse and move into “the Republic of Good Enough.” The best way is with measured steps, coupled with realistic goals and an understanding of where you actually want to go in your life. Unfortunately, he wanders off the point in the final chapter, when he discusses sociopolitical reforms like a universal basic income and progressive taxation. This section has a tinny tone that clashes with the sturdy research of the rest of the book. However, the author delivers many useful lessons and valuable insights, and that might be quite good enough.
Depression and anxiety are at epidemic levels; this book offers an alternative path to a fulfilling, productive life.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982149536
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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