A thoroughly accessible, valuable guide to understanding, managing, and living with anxiety.
A manual shows readers how they can manage their anxiety with everyday tools and practices.
Santen is a mental health counselor who specializes in relationship, life, and personal development coaching. In his professional and private life, the author saw how many people were suffering from anxiety on a daily basis without realizing it—and how there were few practical solutions they could access and afford. His book acknowledges the approaches to anxiety employed by psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists and focuses on the accessible, everyday solutions that people can use without therapy or medication. Santen details how to approach, deal with, manage, and lower anxiety over time. The book first gives a graspable explanation of what anxiety is and how people have come to understand it, and then it moves into examining all the major and minor contributors to anxiety, including life events, depression, lack of sleep, diet, relationships, emotional stress, screens, and the list goes on. Finally, in the last part of the guide, Santen describes what anxiety management can look like for individual readers by delving into internal emotional methods, medication options, meditative practices, self-organization, and more. This manual is chock-full of valuable nuggets that bring anxiety into the light, such as “The body abandons self-care in favour of self-preservation.” Santen perfectly balances technical information about anxiety and panic with applicable tips and resources that don’t overcomplicate solutions. His writing style manages to be informative without being stuffy, and a notable strength of this volume is that it works to prove that anxiety varies greatly in people and that they can tailor permanent solutions to help themselves. While it’s important to remember that individual care is always recommended, this manual is a superb resource for busy people who may not be aware of how much anxiety affects their lives but who want to live better. The author asserts that “people suffer when their belief about reality does not match reality,” and his book greatly helps readers make peace with that gap.
A thoroughly accessible, valuable guide to understanding, managing, and living with anxiety.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2022
ISBN: 9780994754929
Page Count: 333
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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