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A review by maxstone98
Capture: Unraveling the Mystery of Mental Suffering by David A. Kessler
2.0
On my copy of the book the subtitle is "Unraveling the Mystery of Mental Suffering". This is false, not just in the sense that the author tried and (in my view) failed to achieve his goal, but the book doesn't even attempt to do that.
This book is solely:
-presenting the age-old and common notion that the mind sometimes gets fixated on things in ways that are negative and hard to escape from (depression, OCD, addiction, etc) as if it were some original theory called "capture" (3% of book)
-canned history of field of psychology (20% of book)
-dozens of vignettes (2-10 pages mostly, although David Foster Wallace gets more like 30-40 pages) of mostly famous people who had mental health problems (77% of book)
And there's not even really much of attempt to relate those parts to each other. There is zero insight into the mystery of mental suffering. It's hard to even explain how weird it is that many of the vignettes have very little relationship to the theme of the book (beyond that they are about people who suffered).
On the positive side, a bunch of vignettes of of mostly famous people with mental health issues is not a bad read, I learned a few interesting things about those people that I hadn't known before. And I was actively interested in learning more about David Foster Wallace (which is why I slogged my way through the book even after it was clear that it was pretty disappointing).
My mistake, I should have gone to goodreads before plunging into this book, the top couple of reviews have nearly exactly the same view as I express above. I was led astray by randomly picking up a book that on the random pages I opened to discussed DFW (interesting to me, as noted), Ted Kaczynski (interesting to me) and had very positive jacket blurbs from Andrew Solomon, EO Wilson, and Tracy Kidder, all authors I respect. Live and learn, I guess.
Additionally annoying is that the endnotes are nearly 50% the length of the main portion of the book (120 pages vs. 250 pages). This is just someone trying to make a statement that they did a lot of homework and are really educated, and way beyond what one would produce if one were just trying to show what one's sources were.
This book is solely:
-presenting the age-old and common notion that the mind sometimes gets fixated on things in ways that are negative and hard to escape from (depression, OCD, addiction, etc) as if it were some original theory called "capture" (3% of book)
-canned history of field of psychology (20% of book)
-dozens of vignettes (2-10 pages mostly, although David Foster Wallace gets more like 30-40 pages) of mostly famous people who had mental health problems (77% of book)
And there's not even really much of attempt to relate those parts to each other. There is zero insight into the mystery of mental suffering. It's hard to even explain how weird it is that many of the vignettes have very little relationship to the theme of the book (beyond that they are about people who suffered).
On the positive side, a bunch of vignettes of of mostly famous people with mental health issues is not a bad read, I learned a few interesting things about those people that I hadn't known before. And I was actively interested in learning more about David Foster Wallace (which is why I slogged my way through the book even after it was clear that it was pretty disappointing).
My mistake, I should have gone to goodreads before plunging into this book, the top couple of reviews have nearly exactly the same view as I express above. I was led astray by randomly picking up a book that on the random pages I opened to discussed DFW (interesting to me, as noted), Ted Kaczynski (interesting to me) and had very positive jacket blurbs from Andrew Solomon, EO Wilson, and Tracy Kidder, all authors I respect. Live and learn, I guess.
Additionally annoying is that the endnotes are nearly 50% the length of the main portion of the book (120 pages vs. 250 pages). This is just someone trying to make a statement that they did a lot of homework and are really educated, and way beyond what one would produce if one were just trying to show what one's sources were.