by Andy Feld ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 16, 2011
A spiritual yet sturdy approach to an issue of national consequence.
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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
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012
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
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by Cheryl Strayed ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2015
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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