A spiritual yet sturdy approach to an issue of national consequence.
Feld’s (Wake Up! Your Life is Calling!, 2009, etc.) self-help manual advocates a sensible, feel-good approach to surviving America’s economic downfall.
In this slim volume, Feld spouts statistics and what-ifs that should concern any American. “China is producing new engineering graduates at almost fifty times our rate in the United States,” he says. Or: What if the value of American homes keeps falling and the current economic state is the new normal? At first glance, Feld appears to be a scaremonger, although it’s hard to refute his logic. He says Americans have grown fat and lazy while the rest of the world has become educated, entrepreneurial, and willing to work for lower wages and fewer benefits. Feld postulates that if politicians continue to demand six-figure incomes and citizens insist on maintaining elite living standards, America will crumble. Endorsing a curious blend of the practical and the ethereal, Feld says that America’s only hope is to embrace love and “oneness.” By recognizing the spiritual thread that connects us all and working on raising our individual “vibrational energy,” Feld says that the country will prosper. The book offers specific, easy-to-follow methods intended to enable readers to access their nonphysical natures. Reaching beyond New Age notions of the higher self, the author proposes commonsense solutions to help overcome the global economic undoing, such as rejecting the victimhood mentality and adopting proactive rather than reactive financial measures. The book vacillates between being a spiritual self-help manual and an economic guide, managing to seamlessly blend the two approaches. It closes with astute suggestions to help reinvigorate America’s fallen state, particularly through a course of action that calls for individual responsibility, including daily meditation to awaken the spiritual aspect of socioeconomic regeneration. Less-spiritual steps toward economic stability include reclaiming overseas manufacturing by lowering domestic labor rates and denouncing material attachments. Some readers may find Feld’s budgetary concepts obvious and his approach too mystical, yet the disparate topics unify successfully into a compelling proposal.
A spiritual yet sturdy approach to an issue of national consequence.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-1462058310
Page Count: 144
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2012
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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