An approachable guide to spiritual concepts that’s likely to appeal to beginners.
In this self-help book, integrative spiritual consultant Duncan explores how to find one’s own “awakening”—in whatever form that may take.
After a childhood bout with cancer at age 11, the author discovered a connection to prayer. A larger life change came decades later after she had a near-death experience and switched from a corporate advertising career to one as a hospice chaplain; she eventually opened her own practice as an integrative spiritual consultant in 2016. Her goal is to help people “awaken,” which, she explains, is “vital to our human spirit….Awakening is remembering our heart and soul and learning how to live more fully from them.” She outlines five steps toward achieving this: mindfully experiencing the present moment; connecting with something greater; building a sense of trust; embodying love for oneself and others; and making sure one is open to new experiences. Duncan’s guide to awakening doesn’t have a particular religious slant, and although she notes that some people call the idea of connecting with one’s own soul or energy “God,” she effectively encourages readers to call it whatever they want—or to call it nothing at all if they wish. This also goes for the author’s discussion of prayer, in which she emphasizes that one doesn’t need to be religious or spiritual to discuss their hopes and dreams out loud. Each section is broken up by anecdotes involving the author’s consultancy clients, and each contains a helpful, step-by-step summary and exercises such as the “Gratitude Meditation”: “Continue breathing in and breathing out. When you are ready, say: I breathe in love, feeling it come through my body, and breathe out any unrest. I feel warmth and gratitude in my heart. I am grateful for life.” Duncan’s warm voice and easily achievable steps make this a fine introduction to meditation and concepts surrounding life balance.
An approachable guide to spiritual concepts that’s likely to appeal to beginners.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781637556085
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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