Buchholz projects a communicable affection for the loud business of life, of risk-taking and devoted engagement in the...
Former presidential economic advisor and hedge-fund director Buchholz (New Ideas from Dead CEOs: Lasting Lessons from the Corner Office, 2007, etc.) sings the praises of competition—in both our personal and professional lives—for leading a happier, healthier life.
The author marshals evidence from a number of sources—neuroscience, psychological investigations, evolutionary theory, common sense and his own experience—to suggest that the great avenue to happiness is being in the hunt, that competition, in all its risk and intensity, is what gets the vital juices flowing. In a zesty voice, and with the occasional wiseacre comment, he presents intelligent remarks on the value of hard work. He draws important distinctions between good and bad competition (“There is a big difference between meeting healthy, productive challenges and plundering your coworker’s ego”) and between good and bad anxiety (the former being nervous energy, the latter a lifestyle without enough choices). Buchholz appreciates that the competitive marketplace is often not fair, but then neither is life—it’s a struggle in which you have to actively engage, and that engagement brings happiness in its wake. Not all readers will agree with the author that “[w]e prefer to earn more than our colleagues at work…because that is a signal that we have earned our keep,” or when he asks, “[w]hat’s the point of hailing a people as happiest if their purported happiness does not inspire them to reproduce?” Although the humor is fun and a little corny for the most part, it can also be snarky: “The contented do not grow smarter, they grow moss.” But the author saves his humanist best for last in a tribute to personal goals, fulfilling forms of competition with yourself that don’t require you to root for the defeat of others.
Buchholz projects a communicable affection for the loud business of life, of risk-taking and devoted engagement in the pursuit of happiness.Pub Date: May 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59463-077-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hudson Street/Penguin
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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
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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