I read this book to educate myself as part of my work on the board of a domestic violence organization.
Written in an academic style, it is neverthelesI read this book to educate myself as part of my work on the board of a domestic violence organization.
Written in an academic style, it is nevertheless clear and compelling. Postmus and her co-authors have led the way in research showing that economic manipulation and abuse in domestic violence situations is an underrecognized and pressing problem.
The book lays out many of the ways that abusive partners use money to control women and hurt their reputations. They will control access to checking accounts and cash. They will take out loans or credit cards in the partner's name and ruin her credit record. They will disrupt her ability to hold a job, sometimes disabling her car, or calling her repeatedly at work, and in many ways making it impossible for her to hold a steady job.
The book urges domestic violence organizations to put economic abuse at the forefront of their work, or at least to make it co-equal with the attention given to physical and sexual violence.
Economic abuse is the number one reason why women won't leave a domestic violence partnership, and it deserves much greater attention than it now gets. The book also urges domestic violence agencies to form partnerships with banks, human service organizations, and others who can add expertise and backing for attention to this issue.
For those interested in this issue, this book is a good starting place, and can even be used just for the value of its checklists of economic abuse tactics and solutions. Recommended....more
I read this book as part of an Enneagram group I joined through my church.
First off, I realize that there is no scientific validation for this form ofI read this book as part of an Enneagram group I joined through my church.
First off, I realize that there is no scientific validation for this form of spiritual personality typing, any more than there is for the highly popular Myers-Briggs. But I still found value in this exercise, as a way of exploring my own tendencies and patterns, and as a way for others to talk about theirs, and how they might move beyond the type that they had inherited or functioned as.
I turned out, no surprise to me, to be a strong Type 7, the Enthusiast/Generalist, thrilled by new ideas, not always so thrilled at having to follow up on new projects and complete them. The small group discussions allowed me to hear from lots of other people (there were almost no other 7s in my group), including Type 5s (Investigator/Thinker), who talked about having trouble reading social cues, or from Type 2s (the Helper) who recognized that they had to stop always trying to intervene to fix situations if they were to remain healthy.
I had much less favorable impressions of The Sacred Enneagram as a book. The front part of the book included an uncritical view of the history of the Enneagram that embraced all sorts of frankly wackadoodle notions about the spiritual significance of this rubric. The later chapters, which focused more on how the Enneagram could be used to help you shape yourself into a more holistic and spiritually connected person, worked better for me. My other major critique of Heuertz's approach was that, whenever he cited examples of how a person's type was influenced by his childhood, he invariably decreed that all the Enneagram types were a form of compensation for negative influences from parents and other family members. It was a pessimistic and dependent view I did not resonate with, and many of my fellow participants in the group had the same problem with it.
But for the value of introducing me to the Enneagram and connecting me to thoughtful, deep thinking people, I am grateful, so I gave the book an extra star for that reason....more
This was a difficult book for me to read, both because of how it was constructed and what it made me have to examine in myself.
Michael Eric Dyson, a GThis was a difficult book for me to read, both because of how it was constructed and what it made me have to examine in myself.
Michael Eric Dyson, a Georgetown professor and Baptist preacher, delivers this book as a written sermon addressed to us white folks. Often blunt, angry, anguished and sweeping in his condemnation, he argues that white privilege is something all whites benefit from, most especially when they want to deny it most.
Much of the book revolves around his anguish over the killing of black men by white police officers and our criminal failure as a nation to intervene more forcefully to stop it, but he also explores everything from jobs to housing to marriage to social relationships .
There were many times I wanted to plead, "but I'm not that white person: I'm the fair minded, liberal, outraged-by-injustice white person."
Dyson helped me to see that that is not a good enough answer, and that I need to do more about educating myself, putting myself out there at both the personal and activist level, and seeing the deep strains of racism that still shape and drive our society.
Like many other whites, I kept waiting for Dyson to address the high gun death rate in the black community itself, as well as the lesser issue of skin color bias within the black community. When he did tackle those topics, it was like a bucketful of ice cold water over my head.
While he never quite acknowledges that the rate of gun deaths, adjusted for population, is significantly higher in the black community, he makes the compelling point that whites overall kill more people and that the vast majority of homicides are white-on-white killings, yet no one approaches that problem through a racial lens. As to the "high yaller" prejudice within the black community, he describes it as one of the many ways in which blacks have taken into themselves a bias originally projected onto them by whites.
Dyson finishes his book with several practical and creative suggestions for how white people can begin to change this long entrenched imbalance in our society, from finding particular black youths or schools or scholarships to support, to simply showing up at demonstrations and vigils now dominated by blacks, to lending our expertise to attacking some of the most systemic manifestations of racial bias.
This is a powerful book, disturbing to me, but uncomfortably, piercingly on the money....more
This is a compact book by Cornell economist Robert Frank that continues his push to get people to consider his major tax reform idea, but also clothesThis is a compact book by Cornell economist Robert Frank that continues his push to get people to consider his major tax reform idea, but also clothes it in the broader issue of how much talent matters in people's success vs. luck.
Frank's main thesis, backed up by convincing studies, is that because there are so many talented, hard working people striving to succeed, the ones who do reach the rarefied air of the top 1 percent also have to have benefited from a great deal of luck, whether it is the country they were born in, their parents' education levels or random encounters they had on their way up the ladder. He illustrates with several examples from his own life, including his near death from a sudden heart attack and the fortunate breaks he got when he was starting out as a young professor.
(This is an attitude, I must say, that you will never see Donald Trump adopt).
Frank then goes on to show that a disproportionate number of wealthy people believe their good fortune is entirely their own doing and owes little to chance. The problem with this view, he said, is that it makes them loath to support the kind of tax investments in modern infrastructure, from highways to research to job creation, that undergird so much of their success, and that in and of itself has contributed mightily to our current economic inequality.
Frank's solution is one he has espoused for decades: replacing the progressive income tax with a progressive consumption tax. All earners would get to subtract their savings in any year from their incomes and be taxed only on their net income. But the tax rates would soar sharply above a certain high income level, which he said would have the effect of slowing down wasteful spending by the rich on luxuries, and making more money available to infrastructure investment.
Frank is a good writer, and this is his most personal elucidation of his theories. If you want a well reasoned approach on why we should be more grateful about our good fortune and how we can use that to our advantage as a nation, read this book....more
I almost never do this, but so be it. Kathryn Schulz is brilliant and this is a deeply important topic -- our painful avoidance of being wrong or appeI almost never do this, but so be it. Kathryn Schulz is brilliant and this is a deeply important topic -- our painful avoidance of being wrong or appearing to be wrong. She is an incisive writer, she scans history and contemporary society for illuminating examples and has enough pithy quotes to fill a Bartlett's.
But in the end I just couldn't plow my way through the whole thing. It may be my attention span or the overwriting of the New Yorker milieu, but I'm moving on....more
This is, hands down, one of the best nonfiction books I have ever read, on a topic of overwhelming importance to the stability and sanity of our natio This is, hands down, one of the best nonfiction books I have ever read, on a topic of overwhelming importance to the stability and sanity of our nation.
Despite a drop in the overall homicide rate from the bad old days of the 90s, the murder rate among African American men continues to be substantially higher than for any other group. In "Ghettoside," former LA Times crime reporter Jill Leovy not only takes a close look at one of those homicides and the men who investigated it, but just as importantly, she takes a scalpel to the whole notion that the problem is just a matter of dysfunctional family structures or overly aggressive policing.
In fact, she argues, the real problem with the way we view and react to black male homicides is that our inner city police forces are overly aggressive at rousting and arresting young men for minor crimes, or just for standing on the street, but are not nearly aggressive enough at investigating homicides.
Are reluctant witnesses a big part of the problem? Of course, and it would be no different if white people were living in a community where they or their loved ones were threatened with harm if they were to snitch.
The lack of vigorous enforcement of homicide, she says, actually makes it more possible for witnesses to be intimidated and for shootings to keep occurring, and police agencies like the one she writes about in Los Angeles are much more fixated on "preventive" policing that often amounts to saturating neighborhoods with patrol cars than with putting resources into homicide investigations.
The human part of this compelling story revolves around homicide detective John Skaggs, who combines a peculiarly Californian mixture of surfer dude athleticism with an unrelenting, action oriented method of investigating homicides. The death it focuses on is that of Bryant Tennelle, the young son of another LA homicide detective, who is gunned own because he was wearing a hat that someone believes put him in a gang, even though he wasn't a gang member at all.
Working ceaselessly on the case, Skaggs and his partners were able to find witnesses who would talk (even though two of them fled before the trial was actually held) and physical evidence that tied a particular gun to the crime.
What also leaps off nearly every page is the grief, anger and agony of black families who have lost young men. They become Leovy's truest innocent victims of this national epidemic.
In this relatively short exploration of one of humanity's most distinguishing traits, Ian Leslie quickly formulates a definite point of view, but backIn this relatively short exploration of one of humanity's most distinguishing traits, Ian Leslie quickly formulates a definite point of view, but backs it up with good studies, strong interviews and a clear, winning writing style.
His basic contention is that curiosity is what has driven scientific and cultural advancement, and that that this powerful impulse in humans may be under threat by the Internet and certain ill-founded educational philosophies.
Unlike some other Internet alarmists, though, Leslie does not damn the Web completely, but simply concludes that it's a wonderful tool for the truly curious, and a damaging distraction for those who either have little curiosity or only a superficial desire to be amused for seconds at a time. He also cites studies to show that, besides such character traits as resilience and determination, the biggest factor in future life success, according to some meta-analyses, is the acquisition of core knowledge.
While some educational theorists have argued that filling children with facts stifles creativity (it's the basic message of TED Talks' most popular video, by Sir Ken Robinson), neuroscience has demonstrated that true creativity depends on being able to make novel associations among many different facts and concepts, and that a knowledge-based education is critical for that.
I found most of Leslie's arguments compelling, and there were enough studies and insights that were new to me, particularly from educational researchers, that it helped propel me through the book....more
Besides being a well-written social psychology book, this spoke to an increasingly deep yearning in my life: to do a better job connecting with real p Besides being a well-written social psychology book, this spoke to an increasingly deep yearning in my life: to do a better job connecting with real people, face to face, who are part of my broader circle of friends.
Has the Internet given me unprecedented reach to others and ways of connecting with old friends I had lost touch with? Of course. But as Susan Pinker demonstrates, study after study have shown that meaningful personal contact can lengthen lifespan, increase children's ability to read and learn, make dating and marriage real and lasting, and make businesses more profitable and better places to work.
She spans many of the studies that have been done, from Sandy Pentland's work with personal monitors showing how people interact in the workplace, to Robin Dunbar's brilliant work demonstrating how 150 is a magic number for the number of personal, closer relationships a human being can have.
She ends with commonsense recommendations on how to increase the meaningful and healthy personal relationships in our lives, and she writes gracefully and straightforwardly throughout....more
I'd like to have given this book three stars because the subject matter -- how we understand people, and the wide range of psychological experiments t I'd like to have given this book three stars because the subject matter -- how we understand people, and the wide range of psychological experiments that have been done to find answers -- is inherently interesting, but Mayer is such a prosaic writer that I just couldn't bring myself to do it.
He should thank his lucky stars that former New York Times writer Daniel Goleman was the first to lay out Mayer's ideas in his best-seller, Emotional Intelligence. Mayer and his colleagues have now developed a new questionnaire and tool designed to expand on EQ and see how good people are not just at understanding their feelings and those of others, but in understanding how people work together in organizations and families, how people can understand themselves well enough to plan successful life outcomes and other such issues.
Interesting issues, dressed up in boring brown paper....more
Most of the material in this series of short essays (easily digestible in one sitting) was familiar to me, but Corballis has a gift for conversational Most of the material in this series of short essays (easily digestible in one sitting) was familiar to me, but Corballis has a gift for conversational explanation with some opinion thrown in, so this was fun.
Perhaps my favorite part was his essay on why walking on two legs may have fostered the smartest animals on the planet (that being us). It's not just that it freed our hands to gesture (and he thinks our language evolved from gesture) and make tools and carry things, but bipedalism meant women could not carry children for as long as most mammals (otherwise they'd never be able to walk), which means the children are born relatively prematurely, which means their brains continue to develop during the helpless stage of infancy, which increases learning and social bonding, and voila, a homo sapiens advantage!
Also fun: his analysis of the difference between lying and bullshit, his reflections on why the brain's functions are asymmetrical, and the intriguing idea that when we learn written language, our right brains produce a mirror image of all the letters we learn in the left brain, helping to explain the frequent letter reversals in children learning to write.
Well, first things first. This is not just about babies. While Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has done some of the most interesting work on the moral in Well, first things first. This is not just about babies. While Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has done some of the most interesting work on the moral intuitions and behaviors of infants and toddlers, there isn't enough of that work to sustain a whole book.
Instead, he uses those experiments to launch a wide-ranging look at how we develop a moral sense. For those who study social psychology, much of this is well-trod ground, but Bloom is a good writer -- clear, succinct, with many good study examples. He covers the emerging field of how our emotions and unconscious impulses can guide much of our moral behavior. For instance, if you wash your hands before doing a moral judgment experiment, you're more likely to judge someone harshly (because unconsciously you feel more pure). If there is a poster of pair of eyes looking out at you while you are in a room, you are more likely to behave in a morally acceptable way, and so forth.
He also has one entire chapter on the trolley studies, which have become one of psychology's landmark memes. This is the thought experiment where you are asked, if a trolley was hurtling down the tracks toward five people, but you could throw a switch to send it down a track where one person would be killed, would you do it? (Most would). Now, on the other hand, if you were standing on a bridge with a large person, would you push him onto the tracks (with the same numerical outcome?). Most people wouldn't.
But it was actually the end of this book that fascinated me most, because Bloom believes our moral reasoning -- our ability to weigh the pros and cons of our moral choices -- has a significant impact, and this is at odds with some other thinkers, who believe our moral behavior is still guided mostly by unconscious and evolutionarily ancient urges, and that our "rational" morality is a post-facto invention to explain decisions we've already made.
He also explores whether religion makes people more moral, or whether it is imply an "accelerant" that can either boost morally compassionate behavior in those so inclined, or inflame punishment in those oriented that way.
This is a provocative book that is well worth the read.
The basic premise of this book by "Tiger Mom" Amy Chua and her husband, both Yale professors, is laid out right on the back cover: America's most succ The basic premise of this book by "Tiger Mom" Amy Chua and her husband, both Yale professors, is laid out right on the back cover: America's most successful groups -- Asian and Nigerian immigrants, Mormons, Jews -- have three strong traits: a sense of group superiority, combined with a feeling that they need to prove that to the surrounding society (insecurity), all bundled with a willingness to defer gratification and work for the future.
Critics will undoubtedly say that the book underrates the social and economic advantages that elite groups can pass along to their children, but much of what Chua and Rubenfeld say makes a lot of sense: Asian immigrants in particular are known for pushing their children to achieve, limiting their free time, believing hard work is much more important than innate gifts, and so on.
Possibly because of the backlash against her earlier book, Chua and Rubenfeld are also quick to point out that these traits carry a dark side: anxiety and a feeling of never being able to satisfy parents; making life choices based on what others want rather than yourself; an inability to enjoy life.
They also admit that their definition of success is a very material one, but they argue that is the measure that many immigrant and other rising groups have used themselves as a yardstick for whether they have made it in American society.
The part of the book that might be most vulnerable to criticism is applying the Triple Package theory -- or the absence of it -- to America's problems of the last three or four decades. However, there is no doubting some of the telling facts: the national debt has exploded and personal savings rates have slumped precipitously, all signs of an inability or unwillingness to save for the future; and they are not the only ones to criticize the self-esteem movement for putting self regard higher on the ladder of individual worth than actual achievement.
From a purely stylistic standpoint, this book is well written, heavily sourced and can provide fuel for dinner table and classroom debates for years to come....more
Is it kosher to say that I found this graphic memoir on bipolar disease delightful?
It's a serious subject, and there is a lot of angst and anger in th Is it kosher to say that I found this graphic memoir on bipolar disease delightful?
It's a serious subject, and there is a lot of angst and anger in the book, but nevertheless, I thought Ellen Forney's sense of humor and creativity shone through in this account of her struggle with bipolar disease, with finding the right combination of meds, with deciding whether taking meds would ruin her creative spark and memory and with deciding in the end that balance was more important than her manic highs.
Just because it is told cartoon style doesn't mean that Forney hasn't packed it full of information, from the DSM listing of bipolar symptoms to detailed descriptions of the drugs she tried and their side effects. But the inventive drawings, done in all sorts of styles, make the book breeze by, and also added important personal dimensions to her story, from her family trips to her parties to her close friends to her relationship with her therapist.
A top-notch book, and if you've never delved into what this disorder is all about, maybe the best single book to read....more
The basic premise of this book by "Emotional Intelligence" author Goleman is that we can't accomplish anything effectively -- whether it's solving a p The basic premise of this book by "Emotional Intelligence" author Goleman is that we can't accomplish anything effectively -- whether it's solving a problem or empathizing with another or understanding how a company works -- without different forms of attention.
Goleman outlines the research that has shown which circuits in the brain allow us to resist impulses, which ones allow us to engage in mindfulness (living in the moment and not giving way to daydreaming) and which ones enable us to understand our own feelings and those of others.
The book had a bit of a scattershot feel to it, partly because I suspect he cobbled some of it together from past books (not suggesting self plagiarism, just rehashing ideas) and partly because he tacked on a final section about how these different forms of attention are essential to effective executive leadership, and that portion felt like a fairly naked attempt to attract business-book customers who otherwise might not have read a psychology or neuroscience trend book.
But Goleman writes well, cites many interesting studies, and makes a good case that the best teachers, managers and other professionals are those who are attuned to their inner emotions and those of the people they work for, and can switch back and forth smoothly between focusing on solving problems to empathizing with those who work for them....more
Douglas Kenrick is a pioneer in the field of evolutionary psychology, and despite the criticism it has received for generating too many just-so storie Douglas Kenrick is a pioneer in the field of evolutionary psychology, and despite the criticism it has received for generating too many just-so stories to explain human behavior, I thought he did a good job not only of introducing the discipline, but citing good studies to make his case.
The mainspring of evolutionary psychology is the idea that we are primarily driven by our desire to pass along our genes to future generations, and that men and women have fundamentally different strategies for doing this. Men play around because it profits them to spread their genes to as wide a pool of women as possible, while women have to invest more resources in caring for children, and so they are much more selective about a mate, and use different standards to choose him.
For just one example, both men and women will gravitate toward more attractive faces of the opposite sex, but whereas men will want to have relationships with the most attractive women, that isn't necessarily the case for women, who are more apt to choose older men because they have more status and resources to help in raising a family.
Even when men and women are not conscious of these evolutionary goals, they still drive many of their behaviors, evolutionary psychologists say, and Kenrick goes far beyond sexual relations to explore everything from male aggression to altruism to the different motivations we have at different times of our lives. He even posits a mating strategy difference for why some people are more religious than others.
I read this for a project I'm doing on depression, and I found it to be an interesting approach to the subject of antidepressants.
In the course of my I read this for a project I'm doing on depression, and I found it to be an interesting approach to the subject of antidepressants.
In the course of my work, I have to plow through a lot of studies on different treatments, how well they might work, and how they affect the brain. But Karp's book takes a different perspective: How do people with depression or other mental illnesses feel about taking drugs and how do the other people in their lives react to their illness and their treatment.
Based on interviews with dozens of people in mental illness support groups, some interesting themes emerge. One is that unlike most other medications, people who take psychotropic drugs feel they are not just attacking an illness, but changing who they are. Some have no doubt the drugs make them a better person or a more authentic version of themselves, but many others, even when they see the drugs as necessary to function and avoid suicide, resent the person the drugs turn them into.
Another interesting chapter had to do with how psychotropics make the social pressures of high school even more intense. They ramp up the normal struggle for autonomy between students and parents, as well as the challenge of figuring out how to fit in with peers and not be ostracized or bullied.
The volume ends with advice from the interviewees for others just beginning to take medications. Among their chief recommendations: learn everything you can about your medications and stand up for yourself with your doctor on which ones work and which ones don't; at the same time, don't give up hope and realize that you are not your illness, any more than someone with diabetes is....more
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