A highly readable look at a medical discipline and its potential benefits.
An introduction to neuropsychology combined with a guide to healthy living.
Debut author Koltuska-Haskin is a neuropsychologist with some 30 years of experience in the field. The first half of this slim volume explains the basics of neuropsychology, defining it as a discipline that bridges medicine and psychology with a focus on brain function. A neuropsychological evaluation allows patients to gauge their performance in different cognitive areas and what they might be able to do to improve it. Just about anyone may find value in a neuropsychological evaluation, the author asserts, whether they’re college students, women going through menopause, or people who’ve suffered a traumatic brain injury. The author talks readers through what they can expect from clinical interviews and tests of emotional functioning. The author particularly emphasizes the importance of such tests, noting that “what you don’t know could hurt you.” Koltuska-Haskin devotes the second half of her book to holistic methods to alleviate harm to one’s brain. The author offers advice on maintaining a healthy diet, practicing meditation, and other activities to promote neurological health. She also discusses the many benefits of gardening. The book is brief at fewer than 200 pages, and it progresses in a swift, cheerful manner. The chapters are similarly short with technical jargon kept to a minimum and a consistently positive tone (“When the plants mature, you can see their beauty”). Fans of self-help books will find some points rather familiar, as when a chapter on the importance of gratitude refers to Oprah Winfrey’s well-known gratitude journal. Still, this book contains plenty of immensely useful and easily digestible information for newcomers to neuropsychology.
A highly readable look at a medical discipline and its potential benefits.Pub Date: May 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948749-61-9
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Golden Word Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A cleareyed call to reshape emotional responses to stress and disappointment.
A game plan to stop being your own worst enemy.
At the beginning of her nonfiction debut, Hardis draws on her personal story as the divorced mother of three to illustrate how people create their own obstacles to well-being. “The belief that you can do hard things is called self-efficacy,” she writes, “and mine, post-divorce, was less than zero.” In these pages, she details strategies for readers to treat themselves more compassionately. She urges them to rethink an all-or-nothing approach to success, hone compassion skills, stop focusing so single-mindedly on outcomes over processes, and so on. Hardis’ guide stresses the value of letting ideas or situations breathe and taking the time to observe how they develop. Practicing patience sometimes yields an answer, even if that answer is to ignore something unpleasant rather than change it. “When we encounter distress or discomfort, it’s intuitive to try to do something to either avoid it or eradicate it in some way,” she writes. “As you’ll learn, however, that only makes it stronger and more persistent.” Writing with clarity and empathy, she argues for the importance of being not so much emotionally available as emotionally “allowable,” better skilled at recognizing and handling “big feelings,” even when they’re negative. In encouraging but forceful prose, Hardis invites the reader to analyze their own reactions and behaviors, for example: When she’s worried about her kids, her behavior is to clean the house—and its function is to decrease worry. “Don’t overthink it, and don’t judge it; simply observe it.” There’s plenty of similarly sound advice in these pages for readers to ponder.
A cleareyed call to reshape emotional responses to stress and disappointment.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9798987361252
Page Count: 232
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author’s sincere sermon—at times analytical, at times hortatory—remains a hopeful one.
New York Times columnist Brooks (The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement, 2011, etc.) returns with another volume that walks the thin line between self-help and cultural criticism.
Sandwiched between his introduction and conclusion are eight chapters that profile exemplars (Samuel Johnson and Michel de Montaigne are textual roommates) whose lives can, in Brooks’ view, show us the light. Given the author’s conservative bent in his column, readers may be surprised to discover that his cast includes some notable leftists, including Frances Perkins, Dorothy Day, and A. Philip Randolph. (Also included are Gens. Eisenhower and Marshall, Augustine, and George Eliot.) Throughout the book, Brooks’ pattern is fairly consistent: he sketches each individual’s life, highlighting struggles won and weaknesses overcome (or not), and extracts lessons for the rest of us. In general, he celebrates hard work, humility, self-effacement, and devotion to a true vocation. Early in his text, he adapts the “Adam I and Adam II” construction from the work of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, Adam I being the more external, career-driven human, Adam II the one who “wants to have a serene inner character.” At times, this veers near the Devil Bugs Bunny and Angel Bugs that sit on the cartoon character’s shoulders at critical moments. Brooks liberally seasons the narrative with many allusions to history, philosophy, and literature. Viktor Frankl, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Tillich, William and Henry James, Matthew Arnold, Virginia Woolf—these are but a few who pop up. Although Brooks goes after the selfie generation, he does so in a fairly nuanced way, noting that it was really the World War II Greatest Generation who started the ball rolling. He is careful to emphasize that no one—even those he profiles—is anywhere near flawless.
The author’s sincere sermon—at times analytical, at times hortatory—remains a hopeful one.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9325-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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