An elementary, useful guide for anxious first-year college students.
Indispensable, pocket-sized book to surviving freshman year and beyond.
Rather than joining the cabal of writers penning repetitive, all-encompassing tomes on the college experience, Kadar, a physician and alumnus of UCLA and Yale, focuses his energies on students’ pivotal first year. By offering sage, demonstrative advice that he wished he’d had when he began college, the author makes a valiant effort to help college-bound youth work out the kinks that come with immaturity and inexperience. Kadar suggests students hit the ground running and establish excellence in their courses early–and avoid the temptation to procrastinate–so that they can finish strong with a positive attitude. Without their parents to “run interference,” students are left to their own devices and must make the most of their newfound independence by taking advantage of everything the college experience has to offer. The author’s four-part stratagem includes becoming familiar with professors’ office hours and always asking questions. Navigating one’s first weekly class schedule may prove daunting, but remaining organized and not overloading the calendar will assist in the seamless transition to a successful freshman year. Other sections include practical information on how to avoid the “dreaded ‘freshman 15’” with a sensible, well-balanced diet; the dangers of party drugs like marijuana and cocaine; and the “joint responsibility” of avoiding unwanted pregnancy. However prudent and well-intentioned Kadar’s takes on alcohol, tattoos, body piercings and sex might be, his teenage audience may turn a deaf ear when being schooled on those particular topics. But, above all, Kadar encourages gratefulness, calling home often, making friends, getting involved in extracurricular activities and enjoying the grand pursuit of fun, since “years from now, you’ll probably recall your college days as some of the best of your life.”
An elementary, useful guide for anxious first-year college students.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-60528-013-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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