A compassionate guide to confronting distress.
How we respond to life’s turbulence.
In the second volume of a planned trilogy that began with How We Are, British health psychologist Deary draws on his clinical work, his research, and his own life and the lives of his family and friends to examine what happens to us when we feel pushed past our limits. A practitioner at a trans-diagnostic fatigue clinic, Deary works with patients seeking help for exhaustion resulting from illness—cancer, cancer treatment, or autoimmune disease, for example—or psychological or emotional stress. Offering several empathetic case histories, he considers the varied nature of toxic climates that “can exhaust our energies” or “cause us to devalue ourselves.” The author is candid about his own experiences with social anxiety, depression, and the terror he felt as a boy treated as a misfit by his schoolmates. Deary also chronicles the case of his mother, a passionate woman “trapped by circumstances” who became exhausted and despondent after a fall. Although research has found a genetic propensity to develop anxiety and depression, Deary underscores the idea that environments shape us more profoundly. Even siblings, eliciting different behaviors from a parent, necessarily grow up in essentially different worlds. Throughout each chapter, the author asks readers to reflect on the stories they construct about their lives and personalities and on the forces and experiences that continue to shape them. Those forces may include a change in work culture—such as a new boss instituting continuous monitoring; a family crisis; an illness; or a persistent nonvisible disability. “People with autism, trans people, queer people, overweight people, anyone marginalized, anyone who has just arrived in a country,” writes Deary, are burdened with the exhausting task of having repeatedly to explain themselves. “Self-befriending,” he concludes, is a step toward healing.
A compassionate guide to confronting distress.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9780374172114
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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
IN THE NEWS
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
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