A debut author dispenses advice on how to design the life of your dreams.
Your life is a garden that requires careful, deliberate tending, according to professional coach Young. Yet too many people let their gardens go to seed, finding themselves frustrated and unfulfilled even if they enjoy the outward trappings of success. In this pithy guide, Young walks readers through the process of creating a “lifescape that feeds your soul and gives you a reason to be excited when you get up in the morning.” Just as a gardener must select the right plants for the climate and the soil, so must we all identify the “required ingredients of our dream life,” she argues. Fortunately, Young has devised a process to help people do exactly that. She begins by encouraging readers to “discover what makes your heart sing,” then discusses topics such as clarifying needs and wants, tracking progress, making use of available resources, creating an action plan, and enhancing one’s professional image. Each chapter ends with a series of pointed questions for readers to answer, which will help them apply that section’s lesson to their own lives. The goal is to move through the book sequentially, ending with a clear vision for the road in mind as well specific criteria for success and a sense of possible obstacles ahead. Though the title suggests a more general self-help tome, the book is primarily focused on helping people find their perfect career paths. The tone throughout is perky and positive, with the implication that once readers have decided what they want out of life, they’re halfway to making it a reality. This rosy “if you can dream it, you can do it” outlook is encouraging, but there’s less discussion about what to do when readers hit a bump or how to cope when their dreams and talents don’t align. But for those who have a nagging sense that there’s something missing from their lives, Young’s work is a valuable starting point.
A practical plan for getting out of the weeds and following the ideal path.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9971207-4-5
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Emerald Lake Books
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL BUSINESS | SELF-HELP | BUSINESS | MOTIVATIONAL & PERSONAL SUCCESS
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Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
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More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SELF-HELP
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“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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