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
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
