bookshelf

TOGETHER

Name: TOGETHER
Author: Vivek H. Murthy
ISBN: 978-0-06-291329-6

THE HEALING POWER OF HUMAN CONNECTION IN A SOMETIMES LONELY WORLD

by Vivek H. Murthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

A touch too pat at times but, overall, a well-considered diagnosis of a real and overlooked crisis in public health.

bookshelf

The former surgeon general examines the health crises brought on by a more overarching plague: loneliness.

“For more than a century,” writes Murthy, “the physicians holding this office [the surgeon general’s] have addressed national health crises ranging from yellow fever and influenza outbreaks to the aftermath of hurricanes and tornados to the terrorist attacks on 9/11.” The epidemic he was called on to address took more insidious forms: eating disorders, depression, opioid and other chemical addiction, and suicide. All have in common a source in social dislocation—but not isolation, since being able to be alone can be a healthy thing—that in turn produces loneliness, the inability to summon human contact when human contact is wanted, even if one is in a room full of people. These days, the author writes, Americans aren’t good at being with others, and it doesn’t help that social media thrives on our loneliness, for which we turn to a world of virtual others for succor. Murthy’s approach is anecdotal, sometimes annoyingly so: Not every observation needs an “I was Joe’s anomie” story to back it, which blunts rather than sharpens the message. Still, the numbers are meaningful. As the author observes, there are more lonely or socially isolated people in America today than there are smokers, smoking having been a health problem that medicine and society banded together to do something about, never mind the tobacco lobbyists. Loneliness is more difficult to spot than a curl of smoke, and for that, Murthy offers some useful prescriptions, including teaching people “self-compassion,” which “is what shields us from—or at least softens the blow of—the judgment and ridicule of people who don’t understand us.” Other measures for young people, who bear much of the weight of the epidemic, include setting aside more family time and encouraging offline as well as online play.

A touch too pat at times but, overall, a well-considered diagnosis of a real and overlooked crisis in public health.

Pub Date: April 21, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-06-291329-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Harper Wave

Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY

bookshelf

MASTERY

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...

bookshelf

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

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY | SELF-HELP

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAWS OF HUMAN NATURE
by Robert Greene

- BOOK REVIEW
THE 48 LAWS OF POWER
by Robert Greene

bookshelf

THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...

bookshelf

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.