1 comments about Irvin D. Yalom: La Psicoterapia y la Condición Humana.

1. This is a wonderful bird's eye view of the work of a genius by a talented psychologist/ writer.Nobody is more qualified to write this passionate overview than Dr Josselson who has been focusing her work,like Yalom, on the therapeutic depth of relationships. (see her other book "The Space between us).

1 comments about Do Justice and Let the Sky Fall: Elizabeth F. Loftus and Her Contributions to Science, Law, and Academic Freedom.

1. This is an edited book which includes articles by a fair number of well-known friends and colleagues of Beth Loftus. Some articles provide reviews research topics while others provide personal details.
   
   The list of authors is impressive. Most of them are well-known cognitive scientists. I might add that these are REAL cognitive scientists, and not the over-zealous activists who pose as scientists in order to combat Loftus' solid scientific conclusions about memory. Here is a list of the authors/chapters: Preface (the editors). (1) Elizabeth Loftus, "Memory Distortions: Problems Solved and Unsolved." (2) Gordon Bower, Tracking the Birth of a Star. (3) Greg Loftus, Elizabeth F. Loftus: The Early Years. (4) M.S. Zaragoza, R.F. Belli, K.E. Payment, "Misinformation Effects and the Suggestibility of Eyewitness Memory." (5) Stephen Ceci, M. Bruck, "Loftus's Lineage in Developmental Forensic Research: Six Scientific Misconceptions About Children's Suggestibility." (6) H. Hayne, "Verbal Recall of Preverbal Memories: Implications for the Clinic and the Courtroom." (7) Henry Roediger, III, M.A. McDaniel, "Illusory Recollection in Older Adults: Testing Mark Twain's Conjecture." (8) D. Strange, S. Clifasefi, M. Garry, "False Memories." (9) J. McMurtrie, "Incorporating Elizabeth Loftus' Research on Memory Into Reforms to Protect the Innocent." Mahzarin Banaji, "Elizabeth F. Loftus: Warrior Scientist." Carol Tavris, "The Cost of Courage."
   
   The cover is amusing, It includes a photo of BL (beaming, beautiful, highlighted in purple) with a bunch of her colleagues --all men and most now famous -- from Stanford in the 1960s. Fortunatetly, the editors fall short of calling this a Festschrift (it's a "Bethschrift.").
   
   Many of the chapters provide excellent new summaries of research on specific topics. For instance, the Roediger & McDaniel chapter provides an excellent, brief discussion of research on memory distortions in older adults. The chapter is not about Loftus, but rather it is about a line of research that she inspired.
   
   Loftus has had a powerful effect on cognitive and clinical psychology. The ongoing controversies and debates surrounding recovered/repressed memories are understandable. As a cognitive scientist and a clinician, I can certainly understand why these are volatile topics because I find myself in the middle of them frequently. But Loftus remains one of my heros, even when I don't like what she has to say. She's a first-rate cognitive scientist and experimentalist, and she tackles tough, important issues with insight and guts. All this was true BEFORE she took on the recovered/repressed memory issue, but she essentially stepped on a land mine when she took on that topic. She's one of the greatest psychologists of our generation, as far as I'm concerned.
   
   Some of the following media (some of which I use in my classes) may be helpful when you are reading this book.
   
   "False Memories" - (~1999), Discovery Channel, Films for the Humanities & Social Sciences (51 minutes, DVD)
   
   Quicktime video of Loftus, UCI Today website (~2006) 2 minutes
   
   "Beyond Belief" (Session 6), Quicktime video, Edge website, Bingham's The Science Network, 2006 ~20 minutes
   
   "Contributions from the Study of Law and Psychology: Memory Research Applied to Real World Problems" 120 minutes, 1994, Quicktime, CCDL libraries
   
   There's an Alan Alda special featuring Loftus, which may be available online...
   
   There are plenty more... To be continued

No comments about Jerome Bruner: The Cognitive Revolution in Educational Theory (Continuum Library of Educational Thought, Volume 3).

2 comments about Windows.

1. This is a book one reads, as one does with Adam Phillips's books, wishing one could be analyzed by the author. Nothing earth-shattering here for theory freaks; Windows is a delightful excursion through Pontalis's light-hearted musings about pain and meaning. Discursive, curt, perfectly appointed, each brief chapter moves you towards compassion, calm, understanding. Seemingly more inspired by philosophy -- I believe the author studied with Sartre -- than psychoanalysis. The metapsychology here is buried in the dirt, though the garden we see is gorgeous.

   Beautifully translated as well.




2. This is a book one reads, as one does with Adam Phillips's books, wishing one could be analyzed by the author. Nothing earth-shattering here for theory freaks; Windows is a delightful excursion through Pontalis's light-hearted musings about pain and meaning. Discursive, curt, perfectly appointed, each brief chapter moves you towards compassion, calm, understanding. Seemingly more inspired by philosophy -- I believe the author studied with Sartre -- than psychoanalysis. The metapsychology here is below the surface, though the garden we see is gorgeous.

   Beautifully translated as well.

No comments about Portrait of a Scientific Racist: Alfred Holt Stone of Mississippi.

1 comments about Tracking Ancient Footsteps: William D. Lipe's Contributions to Southwestern Prehistory And Public Archeology.

1. Professor William `Bill' L. Lipe has enjoyed a five decade career that has made him an acknowledged and respected expert in conservation archaeology and the archaeology of the American Southwest where he has worked in Utah's Glen Canyon, Red Rock Plateau, and Cedar Mesa, Colorado's Dolores Valley and Mesa Verde, and key archaeological projects defining much of what we now know about Native American life in antiquity. It was Professor Lipe who developed the concept of `private archaeology' and served in the Society for American Archaeology, the Register of Professional Archaeologists, and the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center at Cortez, Colorado. Assembled and edited by R. G. Matson and Timothy A. Kohler, "Tracking Ancient Footsteps: William D. Lipe's Contributions To Southwestern Prehistory And Public Archaeology" is a compilation of articles by nine of Professor Lipe's associates, each of whom outlines the archaeological digs and researches associated with his remarkably productive career. Of special note is the final chapter, `A Conversation with Bill Lipe. An impressive and highly recommended addition to academic library Archaeology and Native American Studies reference collections and supplemental reading lists, "Tracking Ancient Footsteps" is not just a testimonial to a consummate professional by his peers, it is also an informed and informative survey of archaeology in the American Southwest and the earliest Native American cultures discovered in the region.

2 comments about Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent.

1. The last time we heard the name of the subject of this biography, Irving Howe, in this space it was as a (well paid) cameo performer and resident literary expert in Woody Allen's comedic send up of mass culture, Zelig. If Woody Allen is regarded as the consummate New Yorker, then Irving Howe, for better or worst and I think for the worst, represented the consummate post- World War II New York intellectual. Furthermore, as detailed here Howe came to see himself, as reflected in various shifts in his literary work and his politics, as a New York Jewish intellectual. (The Jewish intellectual aspect of this biography is a little beyond the scope of what I want to review here but should be mentioned as it is a central theme of Professor Sorin's work).
   
   Moreover, as a perusal of this sympathetic, sometimes overly sympathetic, biography will reveal, as if to add insult to injury, this long time and well known editor of the social democratic journal Dissent fancied himself a New York socialist intellectual, as well. And that is the rub. As I will argue below Howe and his `greatest generation' cohort of public intellectuals did more than their fair share of muddying the political waters as people of my generation, the generation of '68, tried to make political sense of the world. And tried to change it for the better, despite the best efforts of Howe and his crowd to make peace, for the nth time, with bourgeois society.
   
   I have mentioned in a review of Socialist Workers Party (SWP) leader James P. Cannon's The Struggle for the Proletarian Party, a book about the faction fight over defense of the Soviet Union and the organizational norms of a Bolshevik party in 1939-40, found elsewhere in this space that I have long questioned the wisdom of the entry tactic into the American Socialist Party by those forces who followed Leon Trotsky in the 1930's. Irving Howe is an individual case study that points out, in bold relief, the impetus behind that questioning.
   
   Howe, born of poor New York Jewish immigrant parents in 1920, came of political age in the 1930's as he gravitated toward the leftward moving Socialist Party in high school and later at that hotbed of 1930's radicalism, City College of New York. As a result of the Trotskyist entry (as an organization then called the Workers Party) into the Socialist party they were able to pull out a significant portion of the Socialist Party's youth group, including Howe, when they were expelled from that party in 1938. This cohort of, mainly, young New York socialists thereafter formed a key component of the anti-Soviet defensist opposition led by Max Shachtman that split from the main body of Trotskyism, The SWP, in 1940. From there on, especially in the post World War II period with the onrush of the Cold War, these `third camp' socialists made their peace, quietly or by a warm embrace, with American imperialism.
   
   The bulk of Howe's intellectual career, as a niche magazine editor and professor at various top-notch universities, thus was spent explaining the ways of god to man, oops, American imperialism to newly minted graduate students. So, not only does Professor Howe serve here as a whipping boy for the errors of the 1930's Trotskyists but also as a prima facie case of what happens when one's theoretical baggage breaks away from a hard materialist conception of history. Therefore, by the time that my generation was ready to `storm heaven' in the 1960's we dismissed Howe and his intellectuals in retreat out of hand.
   
   Professor Sorin does a very good and thorough job of describing the tensions between Howe's branch of the Old Left and the various components of the New Left as each group squared off against the other in the Sixties. Sorin gives, as could be expected from his sympathies, his protagonist Howe much the best of it. For our part, we of the New Left may have made every political mistake in the book due to more than our share of naiveté and overzealousness but we had a better sense than Howe and his ilk of how irrational the forces that we opposed (and still oppose) really were. But read the biography and make your own decision on that.



2. Irving Howe was a 20th century Renaissance man who wrote with conviction and intelligence on three different areas: politics, literature, and Jewish culture. Although he made a living as a college professor for much of his life, most of his diverse and voluminous publications were meant for people outside academia. Howe is perhaps best known as the author of World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made, but he was also an editor of and contributor to the journal Dissent for many years, as well as the author of a number of books of literary criticism.

   Howe was a socialist. In his youth, he was a Trotskyist, and like many people, his politics became more moderate as he matured. But unlike many others from his generation of leftwing activists - some of whom were supporters of Stalin in their youth and then extreme conservatives later on - Howe remained a firm believer in democratic socialism throughout his adult life. This is not to say that his basic consistency always led him to what seem in retrospect to have been good opinions. In this regard, author Gerald Sorin gives us Irving Howe, warts and all (pardon the cliche). For example, before and even during World War II, Howe viewed that conflict as not much more than a battle between imperialist powers. Howe also fought long and hard with the New Left activists during the 60s - while some 60s radicals probably did think they were the first people to notice that there are problems in America, Howe's response to their arrogance left a lot to be desired. Howe also didn't exactly see the import of the women's movement in its early years. To his credit though, Howe eventually came around somewhat on feminism and was also an early and vocal supporter of the civil rights movement.

   Just ten years after his death, many of the socialist ideas and ideals that Irving Howe wrote about seem to have been inspired by convictions that are anachronistic in today's world. Gerald Sorin does a terrific job conjuring up Howe and his world in a way that makes you hopeful that democratic socialism is still something that might just work, if it were given half a chance. Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent is a fine biography of a thoughtful man who believed that the world could be a better, more just place for all people.

1 comments about Jacques Lacan.

1. Very well written.
   
   First of all, this book is interesting from a peeping Tom perspective. And not surprisingly, Lacan is portrayed as self-absorbed, cold and opportunistic, desperate for recognition. The book covers the bitter institutional battles, too.
   
   However, the book is also quite relevant from the point of view of Lacan's theoretical development. Roudinesco's explicit account of the thinkers Lacan uses / is inspired by when developing his concepts is very helpful. Note, though, that Zizek claims that some of these interpretations are problematic. To me it was particularly interesting to note that in addition to Freud, Bataille was important for Lacan when developing the notion of the Real.
   
   Overall, Roudinesco's is number two on my list of intellectual biographies, just behind Safranski's superb Heidegger-biography.

2 comments about My Reconstructed Life.

1. This is more than a story of a Holocaust survivor, it is a story of one man's personal trimuph. In this brutally honest and open autobiography the author decribes his peaceful childhood that was shattered by the Holocaust. Although a portion of the book describes his life, and death of most of his family, during the Holocaust, the second half of the book is a psychological drauma of how this young man rebuilds his life against more improbable odds. After he survives near certain death in the concentration camps his losses continue to mount. The author brings the reader into his psyche when he decribes pivitol decisions: whether to kill his abusive concentration camp guard when given the opportunity, to live with his father after the war or seek out an education, or to marry into wealth but loose control over his destiny. Although I would recommend this book to any person interested in Holocaust history or Jewish Studies, I think my recommendation goes beyound that limited group. This is a book that most mature high school students should read but I can recommend it to any adult who wants to know how one young man rebuilt his life after loosing everything, then loosing more.



2. I was fortunate enough to get a prerelease copy of this book before it hit the streets. Some people wanted to know what I thought about it because I have an interest in identity issues. I really liked it. It's a very honest treatment given the series of events that the author describes. The author contrasts different times of his life in relation to the atrocities that occurred in Hitlerite Germany. I don't think that you have to have a pronounced interest in Judaism to appreciate the depth of pain and suffering that happened during this time in history or to this man in particular. Though, if you do or if you're in interested in human rights issues, there's an additional benefit associated with it. The net result is that this book gives a very real human face to a very real human tragedy that now seems foreign to most. Though the barbarism of the Nazis is unsettling at times, it's worth the read. The truth often hurts. Maybe it should because that way you can learn from it. Good stuff.

No comments about The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud..