by Veronica O'Keane ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 25, 2021
A welcome new voice in the literature of consciousness and neuroscience.
A veteran psychiatrist examines how memories form to create accounts of who we are.
Memory is a function of both time and place. For very young children, writes O’Keane, a professor of psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin, time “doesn’t exist experientially.” The days constitute an eternal present. “Children are not so much adaptable as partly amnesic,” she adds, which helps explain why most adults have so few crystal-clear memories of their earliest years. Nonetheless, as she writes in this pleasing blend of psychiatric case studies and the latest findings of neuroscience—findings that, she observes, haven’t yet been fully embraced or even understood by most physicians—the early years are critical to who we become. Children born into poverty, for instance, suffer disproportionately from stress (and associated high levels of cortisol), which has detrimental effects on general health. As for older people, many are stressed and forgetful—but not necessarily because their minds are slipping. O’Keane counsels that things are not so much forgotten as that we “never laid down a memory for it in the first place,” an act that involves building dendritic connections in the brain. Whereas time stands still for the young, it flies by for the old, a matter of subjective sense. The author delivers interesting observations on nearly every page. For example, the brains of people who suffer from depression have a smaller left hippocampus than people who don’t, and a mark of human phylogenetics is the pruning of the jungle of information from childhood in our 20s and 30s, “enabling the developing brain to take shortcuts through learned pathways of knowledge.” A virtue of O’Keane’s complex but not daunting discussion is her insistence that our understanding of the science of the brain should, among other things, serve to remove the stigma associated with mental health conditions such as schizophrenia, for “individuals with psychiatric illnesses have a great deal to tell neuroscience, and the larger world, about the processes involved in the organization of memory.”
A welcome new voice in the literature of consciousness and neuroscience.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-393-54192-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
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by Sloane Crosley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 27, 2024
A marvelously tender memoir on suicide and loss.
An essayist and novelist turns her attention to the heartache of a friend’s suicide.
Crosley’s memoir is not only a joy to read, but also a respectful and philosophical work about a colleague’s recent suicide. “All burglaries are alike, but every burglary is uninsured in its own way,” she begins, in reference to the thief who stole the jewelry from her New York apartment in 2019. Among the stolen items was her grandmother’s “green dome cocktail ring with tiers of tourmaline (think kryptonite, think dish soap).” She wrote those words two months after the burglary and “one month since the violent death of my dearest friend.” That friend was Russell Perreault, referred to only by his first name, her boss when she was a publicist at Vintage Books. Russell, who loved “cheap trinkets” from flea markets, had “the timeless charm of a movie star, the competitive edge of a Spartan,” and—one of many marvelous details—a “thatch of salt-and-pepper hair, seemingly scalped from the roof of an English country house.” Over the years, the two became more than boss and subordinate, teasing one another at work, sharing dinners, enjoying “idyllic scenes” at his Connecticut country home, “a modest farmhouse with peeling paint and fragile plumbing…the house that Windex forgot.” It was in the barn at that house that Russell took his own life. Despite the obvious difference in the severity of robbery and suicide, Crosley fashions a sharp narrative that finds commonality in the dislocation brought on by these events. The book is no hagiography—she notes harassment complaints against Russell for thoughtlessly tossed-off comments, plus critiques of the “deeply antiquated and often backward” publishing industry—but the result is a warm remembrance sure to resonate with anyone who has experienced loss.
A marvelously tender memoir on suicide and loss.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780374609849
Page Count: 208
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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PERSPECTIVES
by Erin Meyer ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 27, 2014
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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