Richard J.

As a former Army psychiatrist, I was disappointed

Revisado: 07-03-24

I was an Army officer and military psychiatrist for a good chunk of my career as a physician up to this point. I'd heard a lot about this book for several years and finally listened to it and was underwhelmed, to say the least. If I could have returned the book, I would have, but I wasn't able to, so I powered through.

The writing was rather weak (often restating a quotation verbatim that he'd mentioned previously in the book) and often oversimplified things. He also went way overboard with the comparison between sex and violence including really graphic sexual imagery and profanity which was completely gratuitous and did not serve his purposes in any meaningful way, in my opinion. Because he was writing in a "nonjudgmental way", it conveniently allowed him to not actually grapple with the reality of guilt many people have related to killing. For example, what if a soldier really shouldn't have killed that civilian woman and child? What if American citizens should have mixed feelings about the Vietnam War, and therefore what soldiers did over there? What if conditioning men to dehumanize and kill people, even in Army training, is sometimes (or often) a bad thing? Those are the toughest questions of all, and he didn't answer them or even bother to raise them. Instead he thinks we need to be more supportive of veterans returning home and throw them more parades. (I can tell you from personal experience that many modern veterans do not enjoy random people on the street telling them "thank you for your service" when they actually have no idea what the soldier has been through. The platitudes can do more harm than good. So I don't think throwing more parades is really the answer here. He also seems unaware that many of the most intense war protests of Vietnam were not repeated in the age of the never-ending war on terror because there is no longer a draft, though that is a different issue that I cannot elaborate on here.) He also seems blissfully unaware of the many PTSD cases amongst the WWII generation that were never treated or addressed, though many of us have plenty of stories of angry grandpas or great-grandpas who never talked about their time in Europe or the Pacific and had brutal disciplinary practices, etc. He also oversimplifies the proximity issue, though this could be partly due to the book's age. Yes, closer-range killing is more likely to be traumatizing in comparison with dropping bombs on people that look like ants, which seems rather obvious and intuitive. But plenty of people who do "impersonal" and remote killing have posttraumatic symptoms, as has clearly been observed in drone pilots in comfortable offices away from the action, killing enemy combatants (and others) in the Middle East and likely elsewhere.

His premises that humans have a natural aversion to killing and that almost anyone can be conditioned to kill are also pretty obvious... though the second of those premises is a bit more tenuous than he would suggest. There are over 500,000 Mennonites in the U.S. alone; does he think he could train them to kill with the right training? Due to their faith commitments (and the many that I know personally), I think not. Many non-resistant or pacifist men had to work with no pay in labor camps during WWII because of their religious beliefs rather than submitting to the conditioning encouraging them to kill. He seems to think he's the first person in the world to notice that pop-up targets on firing ranges are a form of classical conditioning just because no NCO he asked described it to him in that exact way. But every NCO knows that they are training people to do something reflexively without thinking, which is exactly what classical conditioning is. This is not a novel insight the author of this book had, though he seems to feel he had many of them.

A lot of other points could be made (including addressing his apparent obsession with how Vietnam veterans were mistreated—again, a broad generalization and oversimplification on so many levels—and his preoccupation with the average age of soldiers being lower in Vietnam than any other war, though he seems to be forgetting that only 2.2 million men were drafted in that war and, even if the average age was higher, 50 million Americans were enrolled in the draft by the end of WWII). However, one of my biggest complaints is his embarrassing lack of up to date psychological knowledge, language, and insights. This is speaking as a mental health professional myself who has worked for years as a psychiatrist for military members and civilians.

He repeatedly touts that he is a "psychologist and a historian". (I should have been skeptical of his credentials earlier on when he claims to have invented a field that he has, rather comically, termed "killolgy".) While it's true that some professionals such as school psychologists have Master's level training, normally people with an M.Ed. degree would be referred to as "counselors" (if they are indeed, working as counselors/therapists). The normal, everyday use of "psychologist" in American English refers to someone who has a doctoral level degree (PhD or PsyD) with significant training and expertise in the areas of psychotherapy and psychological assessments, including instruments like psychological testing. When he nonchalantly mentions several times that he is a "psychologist", I think most people assume those are his credentials when he does not actually have a doctorate (and could not, for example, be a full member of the American Psychological Association). My psychology professor in college would not have referred to himself as a "psychologist", nor should this author be giving people the impression that his what most people know of as a psychologist. This may seem nitpicky but I think that, not only does his careless use of language inflate his credentials for laypeople listening to the book, but his actual use of psychological language is sloppy and dated. I didn't take notes on this book since I wasn't originally planning to write a review, but he used terminology like "psychotic", "insanity", "obsessive-compulsive", and "hysteria" in ways that either a) wouldn't be used any more by modern mental health providers (even in the 1990s when this was first written) or sounded more like the way the terms would have been used by a Freudian psychoanalyst in the 1940s. It was as if he was using completely different definitions for terms from any modern mental health provider. Not only that, but he referred to the DSM as the "bible of psychology" (I personally dislike it when people refer to the DSM as a "bible" but, regardless, no one, and I mean, no one, refers to it as the "bible of psychology" because it was written by psychiatrists, and yet he doesn't seem to be aware of this). Then at a later point in the book he explicitly said the DSM was written by the American Psychological Association when, in fact, the DSM is written by the American Psychiatric Association. This may seem like a small distinction but given the major difference in training, credentials, and organizations between psychologists and psychiatrists (and, as a psychiatrist I have GREAT respect for psychologists), I have literally never heard a professional mental health provider make this mistake. It's just bizarre and blatantly wrong, like a meteorologist not knowing what humidity is. While this kind of thing may not stand out to a lay person, to a mental health expert, this kind of odd oversight in writing and editing is something that really undermines his credibility.

He also conveniently avoided talking about gun ownership and other low-hanging fruit, but apparently that was part of his goal to be "nonjudgmental". Unfortunately I feel compelled to listen to his other book I already own and can't return it, but I do not have high hopes after this one. Personally, I also didn't care for his reading very much, but I couldn't do a better job myself, so that is one area where I have no room to complain other than to say that a professional reader would have been preferable.

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Interesting and well-written

Revisado: 06-08-24

Mark Ward's book on the increasing unintelligibility of the KJV, despite its many assets, is well worth a listen. It is thoughtful and well-researched, but he keeps it light with his distinctive style of clever humor. I have seen many of his YouTube videos and enjoyed his reading of his own work here.

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Disappointing treatment of biblical data

Revisado: 04-02-24

As someone who was in the military for many years before getting out due to changing conscience convictions, I am strongly committed to non-resistance from a biblical perspective. I had hoped this book would equip me with further helpful analysis, in addition to what I have read elsewhere, dealing with challenging biblical texts. Instead, this book, to my great disappointment, is full of contradicting conclusions and disparaging comments about God and the Bible. I almost never leave Audible reviews and didn't really want to take the time to write a full review of all of my concerns with this book. However, this book out stood out for all the wrong reasons. For example, even though he says in one place that Jesus is God and there aren't multiple gods in the Bible, elsewhere he says that now we are supposed to follow the ethical teachings of Jesus, "not the God of the Old Testament". He specifically pits Jesus, who is God, against God, as if God's character can be self-contradictory. Though I'm sure the author would deny it, this is the thrust of the heresy Marcionism.

He also went to great lengths to explain that the biblical authors were actually blinded by their own sin and selfishness and often they misinterpreted what God was doing, remaking Him in their own image, such as attributing killing to Him when actually they were just misperceiving what was going on. Of course, if you were to examine specific biblical texts one by one, you would see this is a ludicrous claim because of all the direct quotes from God referring to Himself as a warrior, as punishing His enemies, etc. (Scripture clearly states it is God's prerogative to punish sin.) And yet at other places he says that maybe God actually was the author of some biblical violence and that's okay, too, because in those cases His "violence was anti-violence". This is but one example of his many contradictory and even nonsensical statements because it seemed as though the author couldn't decide whether God was never the author of violence or whether sometimes God used violence but He was actually secretly "non-violent" all along and people just couldn't see that until Jesus came.

Personally, I have become convinced that God is the one who can give and take life and He chose to use the Israelites to purge the Promised Land in that very specific time and place—that was His prerogative—but this does not necessarily authorize participation in war for modern Christians. However, this author's view is that God sometimes permitted or even commanded "immorality". That God would command something immoral is one of the many heterodox views expressed in this book. He is quick to point out that people shouldn't get sidetracked with "outlier" examples (in other words, examples in Scripture that blatantly contradict his thesis) and he repeatedly comes back to his own Gnostic view that he's able to read a deeper meaning into the Old Testament texts which are actually teaching something very different from what they seem to be saying.

While I agree that we read the Old Testament very differently through the lens of the New Testament and Christ's life and work than we might otherwise read it, he takes this to an extreme in putting forth his special, superior knowledge. His pick-and-choose, cafeteria-style, just-my-Bible-and-me interpretation of Scripture done in a complete vacuum outside of historical theological interpretation is disappointing and unhelpful, to say the least. I'm stunned how many people on Amazon gave this book rave reviews, but I can only assume they haven't read very widely on the topic. There are much better works out there which respect the integrity of the Bible for people who believe it is truly God's Word.

Although I don't agree with every conclusions in the other books (nor would I expect to), Preston Sprinkle's "Fight" (referenced numerous times in this book), for example, would be the best place to start for someone wanting a review of biblical violence from a thoroughly orthodox and evangelical but non-violent perspective. I would also recommend some of the conservative Anabaptist who are writing from a "non-resistant" view (which they distinguish, for good reason, in my view) from "pacifism". Also see Copan and Wells on explaining difficult material such as the conquest passages.

In summary, there are far better options on this subject that treat God's character and His self-revelation in Scripture much more carefully and reverently. Read those.

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Still insightful almost 40 years later

Revisado: 08-19-23

Postman's history of communication technology and critique of television is both shocking and informative. It is still relevant even as American culture had largely transitioned to internet-related distractions in place of television as it existed in the 1980s when this was written. Great book!

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Excellent

Revisado: 02-25-22

This book provides an enlightening philosophical history which serves as the backdrop to our current cultural moment, particularly in the United States. I appreciated Dr. Trueman's detailed analysis, which drew on a great number of sources, and objective tone which avoided much of the distractingly inflammatory language which is so common in current Christian critiques of culture. I am a Christian psychiatrist so this was all very pertinent to my faith and my work. It is also outstanding as far as author-read books are concerned. Dr. Trueman's narration is excellent. Highly recommended.

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Excellent historical review

Revisado: 01-29-22

This book was a truly fascinating discussion of conflicting theological interpretations particularly regarding slavery around the time of the Civil War. I think any Christian, especially in America, would find this informative and thought-provoking. The references to American individualistic tendencies and how they affect one's interpretation of Scripture should give us all pause.

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Practical principles, helpful on hyperfocus

Revisado: 06-20-21

As a psychiatrist who works with many clients with ADHD and who is always looking for more ADHD resources, I appreciated Mr. Merki's emphases in a few areas. His discussions of misconceptions about ADHD and bad advice people give was good and one of the greatest strengths up the book was his frequent revisiting of hyperfocus and the problems it creates. Hyperfocus is not fleshed out well in many books and he really sees it for what it is-- something which usually does more harm than good and saps your tile and energy. I also found his discussion of tacit knowledge, binary and non-binary tasks, and "failure mechanisms" for reevaluating plans to be helpful points that are not emphasized in many books.

(Note: I was provided a complementary copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I would also note there is some profanity throughout the book just in case that would be a consideration for some readers/listeners.)

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