Haunting and impactful, this story does not leave the mind easily.
A dark vault of pseudoscience, mental illness, and fame contained in a chronicle of four identical quadruplets in midcentury America.
In her latest book, following The Unfit Heiress, Farley chronicles the devastating lives of famous identical quadruplets born in 1930 to Carl and Sadie Morlok. The Morlok quadruplets performed on stage and off, maintaining the image of the perfect American family with matching outfits, dance routines, and plenty of publicity. Behind the doors of the Morlok home, however, the girls lived in a tumultuous, often brutal environment. By their mid-20s, all four were diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalized. At the time, schizophrenia was one of psychology’s core puzzles, and the Morlok girls were the once-in-a-lifetime candidates for research. At the time, writes the author, “the estimated frequency of quadruplet births with at least one baby surviving is about one in a million….The chance of their all having schizophrenia is about one in one and a half billion. It’s hard to imagine they will ever again have such an opportunity for study.” Pulling no punches, Farley chronicles their story from birth to death, extracting the truth of their abuse by their father, the medical community, and the world. Not for the faint of heart, the book is a powerful but unsettling tale. Readers will be upset at the horrifying events of the girls’ lives as well as America’s dark obsession with them as children. Throughout, the author does well to maintain concise readability while investigating the murky waters of midcentury psychology, pop culture, and eugenics. The archival narrative approach feels deeply personal with respect to the Morlok women, but the segments expanding on psychiatric philosophy and procedures may take readers out of the otherwise novelistic flow of the text. Nonetheless, Farley tightly interweaves the quadruplets’ lives with the story of America’s fraught relationship with mental illness.
Haunting and impactful, this story does not leave the mind easily.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781538724477
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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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