A thoughtful and well-written explanation of how to communicate.
A guide focuses on managing productive conversations in challenging circumstances.
This self-help book encourages readers to approach potentially fraught conversations with a clear understanding of goals, emotions, and boundaries in order to set realistic expectations and achieve the best possible results. Wonson explains her trademarked “Navigating Challenging Dialogue” process, which, she asserts, allows her to be “a steward of healthy conflict.” After describing her background in communication, relating how she learned to combat unhelpful emotional responses, and incorporating a smidge of neurobiology, the author lays out a four-step process for readers. With numerous examples drawn from her consulting clients, Wonson explains how to avoid emotional triggers, adjust assumptions, listen to the other party's responses, and maintain an open curiosity in order to reach an acceptable resolution. The author reminds readers that conversations can succeed when they accept that they only have control over their own emotions and reactions, not those of anyone else in the exchange, and adjust their expectations accordingly. The book’s discussion of how to respond to tears is particularly intriguing, offering strategies for reacting appropriately to strong emotions without making assumptions about how the other party is feeling. For instance, Wonson suggests saying “I see tears. Can you tell me what they mean?” before drawing conclusions about why a conversation has led to crying. The manual also does a good job of providing scripts that readers can employ when they need to pause a conversation in order to regain control of their own emotions. The volume’s many anecdotes are well chosen and serve to illustrate the more abstract concepts in Wonson’s framework, making it easy for readers to adapt it to their own needs. While the fundamentals of the process will be familiar to those who have read other works on healthy communication, the author’s clear explanations of how she came to understand and apply the common concepts make for an effective introduction. She builds a solid case throughout the text for the value of following the steps she enumerates.
A thoughtful and well-written explanation of how to communicate.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73645-893-8
Page Count: 178
Publisher: NCD Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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