Time-honored meditation and cutting-edge neuroscience come together in Watkins’ debut, a lesson in good living with a thin narrative frame.
The unnamed journalist narrator may be just scraping by, but when his editor offers him an unpaid assignment on Roatan—an island off Honduras famous for its diving but not yet overdeveloped as a tourist trap—this scuba enthusiast can’t say no. The assignment is to interview a self-help philosopher named Paul. A few pages in, readers meet Paul, and while the narrator occasionally dives or sees parts of Roatan (black-and-white pictures included), the bulk of the book is given over to Paul’s explaining his self-help techniques. As Paul notes, these techniques and philosophy are not original to him; they’re a grab bag, from the Buddhist concept of right action to recent studies in neuroscience. As the narrator discovers, though these meditative and psychological techniques may be difficult, they are also effective—more effective than any of the self-help books that get brought up in this work (e.g., The Secret). For instance, when an embarrassing social faux pas continues to haunt the narrator, Paul teaches him, through a visualization exercise, to learn the lesson offered by that emotional cue but not to be caught up in it. In another example of Paul’s helpful techniques, he breaks down the process of habit formation—repetition, trigger, action, reward—to teach the narrator how to form or substitute better habits. Readers interested primarily in breaking habits may want to go on to a more in-depth specialist work on the subject; but in clear language, Paul gives an overview of this and other topics related to being mindful. And as much as Paul may be taken as a helpful guide in these areas, as he winningly notes, he has no spiritual insights to offer; many of these techniques require the user to work for his or her own goals rather than to some guru-given end. There isn’t much to Paul or the narrator as characters and not much plot beyond these dialogues, though it works well as a primer to these techniques and philosophies.
Clear and compelling language help unify this guide to living well.
Pub Date: April 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1489507648
Page Count: 172
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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
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