An innovative one-two-three–punch approach to self-help and healing from an author who has helped countless readers change...
More solid advice from the author of Daring Greatly (2012) and The Gifts of Imperfection (2010).
For nearly 15 years, Brown (Social Work/Univ. of Houston) has researched human behavior and advised people to dare to do great things. Inevitably, however, there are moments when we try and fail. Here, the author gives readers the necessary tools to get up and try again. Brown outlines a three-step process—the reckoning, the rumble, and the revolution—that unfolds much like the three major acts in a book or play. In the reckoning stage, we identify the emotions inherent in an experience and begin to think about how the emotions interact with thoughts and behavior. In rumble, we connect with the stories we create around an event and cross-examine them to determine the truths and half-truths that might lie below the surface. Some feelings that might surface are shame, blame, accountability, criticism, disappointment, generosity, nostalgia, and forgiveness. In the book’s longest section, Brown identifies 15 “rumble” topics, and she breaks down each one. She analyzes how we often invent stories that aren’t necessarily true, since they may be based on experiences from the past, childhood memories, and perceived notions of another person’s thoughts and desires, which can be entirely off-base. The author uses ample examples from interviewees, other researchers, books, and even song lyrics to illustrate her methodology. In the revolution phase, the truth that’s been exposed in rumble gives us energy to stand back up as a changed person. “The rising strong process can lead to deep, tumultuous, groundbreaking, no-turning-back transformation,” writes the author. “The process may be a series of incremental changes, but when the process becomes a practice—a way of engaging with the world—there’s no doubt it ignites revolutionary change.”
An innovative one-two-three–punch approach to self-help and healing from an author who has helped countless readers change their lives.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9582-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
PROFILES
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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