03-23-2007, 05:18 PM | #1 |
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Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: The Orgasmatron
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Brodie: it just dawned on me
People like to read her, especially if you're cynical, because she was into English lit. That's all her masters was. Reading her bio, it shows she was an effective public speaker and wrote clearly.
What I don't like about her is her penchant for trying to be a historian, when she lacked any formal training and her penchant for psychobiography, which failed miserably in her Nixon effort, because she has no psychological nor psychiatric training. She doesn't exhibit any knowledge of any of the known schools of psychological training, be it Gestalt or cognitive behavorial. Yet people like a good story, and she gave them a good story, irrespective of the facts, or critical reasoning. Pyschobiographies should not be written by English lit people. If Seattle writes a Roman history as a thriller, I'm dying to read it, due to his vast interest in it as a hobby. He demonstrates clear writing and thinking on matters for which he does not have an axe to grind. Nonetheless, I doubt he will try to give us psycho babble, because that's not his training, formally or informally. Nothing in Brodie demonstrates any training in an area where she pawns off her abilities. The psychobiography was just a genre that literary types accepted for a while. I don't believe they are very acceptable in biographical or historical circles any longer.
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03-23-2007, 05:23 PM | #2 | |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Seattle, WA
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Quote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Tuchman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelby_Foote
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Interrupt all you like. We're involved in a complicated story here, and not everything is quite what it seems to be. —Paul Auster |
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03-23-2007, 05:44 PM | #3 | |
Assistant to the Regional Manager
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: The Orgasmatron
Posts: 24,338
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Quote:
I am currently reviewing aspects of psychology, in philosophical and clinical terms, discovering that our lay persons' understanding of the human mind is cartoonish. Thus, when a person makes no efforts to study in depth this field, our efforts to convey it in writing result an amateurish attempt to look into another's mind and cavern.
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