Reviews for Adaptation to Life

The average rating for Adaptation to Life based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-10-29 00:00:00 Darcey Singer This book is a like a wide-lens biography. There are dozens of men we learn about and we see them live and change over decades. With the breadth of characters it was not hard to see myself in many of them and begin to wonder about the influences that were shaping me, right here, in real time. It was deeply confronting to stare this in the face. Without ever giving any direct life advice, this book was the best of self-help books because it lets you to take from it what particular wisdom you need and will teach different people in different ways. The main lesson I found in the book is that character is not formed by large isolated events but the slow, steady effect of relationships. Freud's idea of mental health as the ability to love and work is found to be true, but deeper than that. By loving and working we find it ever easier to love and work, or by falling out of this positive cycle, we become more isolated and selfish and ever more unable to join it. Life builds on momentum. Experiences in childhood and temperament may create the outline of a person but it is how the world acts upon that person that moulds them slowly, over decades. Friendships, relationships and worthwhile work are the benevolent winds that gently steer a happy course. Someone without them increasingly turns inwards to seek comfort and that source is shallow and will soon be propped up by fickle, destructive pleasures which can quickly slide into addictions. There is much in this book which supports traditional values as the best way to live. A stable and faithful marriage, for example, is crucial to a good life; solid, honest friendships as well. The evidence illuminates why these ancient codes are the way they are. Honesty, for example, is a mysterious virtue which at first glance seems to have no clear benefit for the person who has it. Yet when we look closer we see that honesty is the gateway to close relationships. Without it, a person can never truly share and blend with another and so they remain cut off and alone, isolated from the engines of life which shape a good and happy character. These are the main conclusions that leap from the pages to me, but someone else will draw something else from these men's lives. In a curious aside, one of the men studied is JFK, so he must be hidden in the pages somewhere. I found myself looking for hints for him. He might be there with his name and details changed but character intact, or he may have faded into the statistics, just a number in a column somewhere. That thought however was enough to remind me that these were real men with real lives and I should certainly be able to learn something from them.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-02-16 00:00:00 Luan Huynh When I first opened the book and read the first couple of chapters, I was initially stunned by the parochial narrow-mindedness of the notions and judgements the author passes upon his subjects. I was about to skim the rest of the book and was already gearing myself up to writing a scathing review. And yet. As I read further and further on, I realised that the book is indeed very valuable. The simple access to a very unique and undervalued study gave the man insight and material to work with few others could ever hope to acquire. Along the way , the author started introducing many notions and adaptation tactics that people use to deal with crises and problems, and explained relative maturity of each style. While the examples he uses in his case studies are not brilliantly portrayed, and way too short to get a real sense of the character of the men, they do sink in after a while, perhaps their very simplicity (or simplification perhaps?), helps us understand the reactions they experienced very clearly. Undoubtedly, we judge all judges through the prism of our own morality. We have changed since the time when the book was written. I think the author may have changed as well. I look forward to reading his "triumphs of experience", not only to find out how the men have changed further with age, but also to see how the writer's prism has evolved.