A solid and well-written manual for emotional regulation.
A self-improvement guide leads readers through a more conscious approach to life.
In this book, Ozdemir encourages readers to understand their emotional triggers, repressed fears, and hidden desires in order to approach life from a higher level of consciousness. Throughout the volume, the author uses the metaphor of a hot air balloon for understanding how unhelpful emotional reactions can hold people back, similar to the sandbags that counteract the heated air lifting the craft. Readers should learn to jettison their emotional sandbags, allowing them to reach greater metaphorical heights. In order to achieve this goal, the guide takes readers through a step-by-step process of becoming aware of emotional reactions, discovering the root causes of the feelings, understanding how they are expressed physically within the body, and developing strategies for responding more consciously for a better overall outcome. Ozdemir gives detailed examples of each part of the process, encouraging readers to record their reactions in a journal. The author provides sample journal entries that demonstrate how to analyze reactions, determine emotional triggers, and formulate a more conscious way of responding. The book’s examples include invented anecdotes (a husband and wife who fail to communicate; an employee who feels unappreciated by the boss) as well as stories from Ozdemir’s own life in which he candidly addresses his shortcomings and explains how he dealt with his emotions to achieve a more conscious approach to his choices and interactions. “Laws of Life” (for example, “The golden key that opens the doors to Ultimate Happiness is locked inside your body”) appear throughout the volume, providing bite-sized encapsulations of the author’s philosophy.
Ozdemir is a lucid writer, and the manual is both readable and actionable. Psychological concepts are clearly explained, and the prose flows easily. The guide makes a solid case for its approach to managing emotional reactions and moving beyond them, and readers are likely to learn from it. Readers who are open to the idea of levels of consciousness will have no trouble with the volume’s depiction of consciousness measured on a scale from zero to 100. Higher levels of consciousness are more desirable, while emotions receive a lower rating (Anger, for instance, “is so instinctive that it belongs to lower scales of consciousness, in the range of 15 to 20,” and can be managed through physical activity). Others may find instructions like “release your fists and all the emotional charges you’ve been holding in your palms out through your feet and into the earth” overly metaphysical for their tastes. But even readers who are skeptical of energy transfer and heightened consciousness may find other aspects of Ozdemir’s process helpful and practical in moving past knee-jerk emotional reactions and developing a more deliberative method of making decisions and interacting with others. The book’s structure offers appropriate scaffolding to readers at all levels of self-improvement, making it useful to both novices and those who are already accustomed to managing their emotions. Although the overall strategy will be familiar to readers of the self-help genre, Ozdemir’s approach allows the guide to feel insightful rather than imitative.
A solid and well-written manual for emotional regulation.Pub Date: May 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-98-981041-8
Page Count: 279
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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