An often engaging personal narrative and self-help work that aims to guide readers along their own paths to well-being.
Somatic stress release practitioner and educator Zaring discusses her personal struggle with a “body-focused repetitive behavior” and shares methods for soothing anxiety and compulsions.
At the age of 44, the Kentucky-based author was falling in love—and falling into emotional dysregulation. She was in her first long-term relationship after her 17-year marriage ended, and she realized that she had to admit to her new partner that she compulsively cut her hair. In this part memoir, part guidebook, Zaring traces her experience with anxiety from childhood to adulthood, when her haircutting transformed from an occasional grooming habit to a condition that’s currently categorized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as obsessive-compulsive. She intertwines her personal account with explanations of the neuroscience behind stress and anxiety, as well as stories of her discoveries of various techniques that proved helpful to her. Her language is often lyrical (“Perhaps this was the beginning of a lifelong dance between my gravitation toward the spotlight and my fear of its searing beam”) but also approachable, and the content is well suited to readers who may be new to anxiety disorders. A short section at the end of each chapter invites readers to practice a guided, somatic technique to connect the body and mind (“Sense It for Yourself”). Zaring is not a health care professional, but the various techniques she explains will engage readers looking for nonmedical options for mental wellness. To that end, the book provides in-depth explanations of the Bowspring Method, the Linklater Voice Method, and the Feldenkrais Method, along with accounts of how Zaring learned and used each one. As the narrative moves further along her journey to overcome a constant need to trim her hair, Zaring shares more of her personal story, including the launch of her first book, Flavors From Home: Refugees in Kentucky Share Their Stories and Comfort Foods (2015). The end of the book features references and further resources on various somatic practices.
An often engaging personal narrative and self-help work that aims to guide readers along their own paths to well-being.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9798901742754
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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