A practical, useful, and comprehensive guide to crafting a motivational work.
A debut manual offers advice on writing an inspirational book that focuses on readers.
Harper has put in extensive time as a ghostwriter. Through her career helping others convey their ideas on paper, she has worked on numerous “personal and professional development books.” Her guide targets potential authors who wish to create works on such topics as obtaining business success and thriving while raising children with disabilities. The manual’s main message is simple: Authors should not aim to explore a certain subject but rather they should write for a specific reader: “A book is not about something. A book is for someone.” The purpose is to help this “Ideal Reader” obtain something or accomplish a goal. Harper lays out various steps and strategies in order to make this happen. For instance, authors must identify messages that make them want to write books. They will benefit from sticking to sensible word count goals and learning to work with editors. Harper shares her own experiences, from becoming determined to write a play at a young age to dealing with life’s setbacks. Some of the advice falls on the obvious side: The first draft of a work is going to be bad (“the Shitty First Draft”); a metaphorical story comparing writing to basketball (with the importance of practice and dedication in both endeavors) is heartfelt but not really groundbreaking. Still, Harper’s enthusiasm is prevalent throughout. She tells aspiring authors: “Write the shit out of your book.” And this manual’s main point about concentrating on readers helps set it apart from similar fare. As the author explains at the outset, many people want to write about, say, business development so they can simply “get something out.” Harper’s recipe that calls for a writer to hold tight to the concept of who the book is for and see it through—no matter the off days and inner doubts—proves to be both sensible and inspiring.
A practical, useful, and comprehensive guide to crafting a motivational work.Pub Date: May 24, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-989603-69-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Page Two
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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