Some common-sense advice on how to attain wisdom when dealing with people and situations.
Social psychology as self-help, from getting along better with your colleagues and employees to saving the planet and securing peace in the Middle East.
Though this book is steeped in academic theory and practice, Gilovich (How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, 1991, etc.) and Ross (The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology, 1991, etc.) explain that they have not written a textbook but one designed to provide more practical applications for lay readers. “Some people are Buddha wise, others Bubba wise, and still others (Warren) Buffett wise,” they write, making a distinction between wisdom and intelligence that attributes more awareness of others to the former while suggesting that those we often call book-smart just don’t have that “insight and effectiveness around people.” The authors rely on anecdote (much of it taken from academic study) raised to the level of parable, using examples to underscore what most readers will know intuitively: how the way we perceive things may not be the way they are, how we’re more likely to recognize rationalizations from others than we are in ourselves and more likely to believe evidence that confirms what we already believe. One interesting conclusion is more counterintuitive, as the authors offer plenty of support for how what we believe often results from our actions rather than seeing action as a result of beliefs. The wider application: that if you “act like a happy person…you will find it easier to be one.” The authors leap from personal behavior and motivation in the first half into societal, cultural, and even international change in the second, offering suggestions, if not necessarily a working blueprint, for how to achieve goals such as global environmental responsibility. None of this is riveting reading, but it rarely lapses into academic jargon.
Some common-sense advice on how to attain wisdom when dealing with people and situations.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4516-7754-6
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
An East German psychotherapist explores, in an occasionally affecting way, the experience of living within a totalitarian system. It was a system in which a citizen had to guard his utterances not only outside but inside the home, because parents could not speak too freely in front of children, who might themselves be indiscreet or inadvertently betray them. The individual was required not merely to conform but to show enthusiasm for the system. It was not possible, Maaz writes, ``to escape this personality deformation.'' The East German system used overt force, including torture and arrest, as well as the indirect force of legal insecurity, reprisals, intimidation, indoctrination, and fear. It required one to ``sacrifice emotional spontaneity, all frankness and honesty, as well as [one's] critical faculty,'' even to preserve a ``relatively safe life of subservience.'' Few were able to resist the pressure. Millions participated regularly in huge ``jubilation marches,'' and an estimated half a million citizens were informants of the Stasi, the secret police. It was little wonder that the capacity for independent thought and action became increasingly rare. In describing this process, Maaz is persuasive and, in a book published originally in 1990 in Germany, prescient regarding the difficulties that East Germans would face in adjusting to democracy. When dealing with the more theoretical foundations of a controlled psychological environment he is less convincing, as when he complains about the authoritarian technique of ``forcing children to sit on the potty''; he is even self- contradictory when, discussing his therapeutic work with patients, he describes the act of emigration from East Germany as a ``sadomasochistic defense of their dammed-up aggression.'' And when he fears for a new economic expansion that will ``exacerbate the ecological crisis'' and ``step up the armaments business,'' he is venturing beyond his area of expertise. Like the curate's egg, good in parts.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03364-3
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
A courageous, often profound, and extraordinary attempt by one of England's best historians to cut through the pessimism and parochialism of the profession and to find the bonds of humanity underlying its conventional divisions. Zeldin (History/Oxford Univ.; The French, 1983, etc.) ranges with prodigious learning over different civilizations and epochs, dealing with subjects as disparate as why men and women find it difficult to talk to one another and why political scientists have misunderstood the animal kingdom. His method is anything but academic: He starts most chapters with an interview or description of a person, usually French and usually a woman (``because many women seem to me to be looking at life with fresh eyes'') before broadening the discussion to analyze the nature of the concerns expressed, their historical origins, and the ways in which different civilizations have dealt with them. In doing so, he raises some questions shunned by the academic world and asks others more likely to be raised in magazines and self-help books: ``Is it inevitable,'' he asks, ``that as women become increasingly adventurous and have ever higher expectations of life, they will find men less and less adequate?'' Why are humans ``still so awkward...with even 40 per cent of Americans...complaining that they are too shy to speak freely?'' In answering questions like this, he repeatedly produces the unusual fact or the revisionist view: Writing of Islamic societies, for instance, he notes that sociability, not war, is considered the defining element of the good life. Ultimately, this is a call for a sense of the richness of life and for optimism, which he defines as ``awareness that despite nastiness and stupidity, there is something else too. Pessimism is resignation, an inability to find a way out.'' Not always as skeptical as he might be (Stalin and Hitler, he says, ``remained desperately hungry for respect''), but no short review can do justice to the richness, humor, humanity, and range of this important book.
Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017160-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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