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Loading... Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experimentby Susannah Breslin
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  SheTreadsSoftly | Oct 30, 2023 |  no reviews | add a review
"What if your parents turn you into a human lab rat when you're a child? Will that change the story of your life? Will that change who you are? When Susannah Breslin is a toddler, her parents enroll her in an exclusive laboratory preschool at the University of California, Berkeley, where she becomes one of over a hundred children who are research subjects in an unprecedented 30-year study of personality development that predicts who she and her cohort will grow up to be. Decades later, trapped in what shefeels is an abusive marriage and battling breast cancer, she starts to wonder how growing up under a microscope shaped her identity and life choices. Already a successful journalist, she makes her own curious history the subject of her next investigation. From experiment rooms with one-way mirrors, to children's puzzles with no solutions, to condemned basement laboratories, her life-changing journey uncovers the long-buried secrets hidden behind the renowned study. The question at the gnarled heart of her quest: Did the study know her better than she knew herself? At once bravely honest and sharply witty, Data Baby is a compelling and provocative account of a woman's quest to find her true self, and an unblinking exploration of why we turn out as we do.Few people in all of history have been studied from such a young age and for as long as Susannah Breslin, but the message of her book is universal. In an era when so many of us are looking to technology to tell us who to be, it's up to us to discover whowe actually are"-- No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)155.2Philosophy and Psychology Psychology Developmental And Differential Psychology Individual PsychologyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3)
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Wikipedia in English
1
Right after Susannah Breslin was born in 1968 her parents enrolled her in an exclusive laboratory preschool at the University of California, Berkeley. She was one of over a hundred children who were research subjects in the Block Project, a thirty-year study and psychology experiment of personality development. The study was supposed to predict who the subjects would be as adults. The memoir has limited memories and revelations concerning her participation in the study and instead focuses on her various life experiences.
The description of this memoir does a disservice to the actual book Breslin wrote since the Block Project plays such a small part in the actual text. Now, the book written is not one I would have been interested in reading and reviewing. I'm not interested in the adult entertainment scene in San Francisco or the porn industry. I pushed through, hoping for more on the study she opened with. Honestly, in the end her memoir and style of writing weren't appealing for this reader. She does finally circle back to the study. The final examination of what happened to it and questions about the future were interesting.
This would have been better if it was an article about her participation in the study, skipped over the memoir bit, and then jumped forward to the final summation of her later research into it and what it could mean for the future. 2 for me, 3 for memoir readers.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Grand Central Publishing via NetGalley.
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