A powerfully detailed method of dealing with life’s pains and injustices.
A comprehensive breakdown of the ways in which people subvert and sabotage their own happiness.
Bushman begins his nonfiction debut by defining his terms, specifically warning readers that when he writes about “acceptance,” he’s not talking about resignation, indifference, or any other species of fatalism. His real target is the complacent idea that happiness is somehow a universally guaranteed right and that, therefore, any unhappiness is wrong—a flaw to be corrected, an unfairness to be redressed. “Acceptance does not mean we like or deserve the experience of pain,” he insists. “It also does not mean we like losing something pleasurable.” Rather, he recommends a personal system akin to ancient stoicism, in which one notes that unhappy things are part of human life and can’t be avoided. His book argues that a slightly less immediate perspective is conducive to healthy living: that is, that pain and disappointment can be acknowledged without further reactions such as resistance, pursuit, anger, or judgment. In a series of densely packed, well-written chapters, Bushman anatomizes the various components of “self-lies” that people use to soften their disappointments and rationalize the unfairness of life, and what emerges is a clarifying system of thinking about the world. “We ignore the complaining engine of our psyches because we don’t perceive any other choice,” he writes, and in his chapters on self-destructive behavior, unhealthy emotional strategies, and the paramount importance of self-care, he lays out a program for exercising control over debased habits and lazy patterns. The author packs a great deal of complicated information into his pages, and he delivers all of it with the smooth skill of an expert teacher (he’s taught classes on comparative religion in the past). He also includes many illustrations, including graphs and charts designed to convey multiple steps at a glance; particularly helpful aids crop up during his discussions of brain chemistry.
A powerfully detailed method of dealing with life’s pains and injustices.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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