An intimate, inviting, and accessible inventory of lessons one man learned on the road to 40.
A debut autobiographical manual targets the no-longer-young set.
Deal’s work blends personal memories and life lessons, told by a man who has seen his share of happiness and heartache. He narrates coming out as gay to his parents over the dinner table and their disastrous reactions (it severely broke their relations at the time). In a rhetorical move that will be repeated many times over during the course of the volume, he instantly turns the story of that all-too-common tragedy into a fulcrum for a quick lesson about self-reliance and the drive to turn bad situations around. Deal attended Florida Atlantic University, got his master’s degree from Nova Southeastern University, and transformed a stocking job into a 20-year career in the Ralph Lauren Corporation. He traces his own trajectory through school years, vacations, family crises, a cheating partner, his abusive father (who was eventually sentenced to time in federal prison for his involvement in a drug cartel), and a dozen tales about college friends and work colleagues. He always fills them with amusing or touching personal notes—and inevitably comes back to anchor new lessons. Some of these offerings are so simple as to be self-evident (“If you need to say something, say it”; “Remember your college years fondly”). Others are distractingly flippant, as when Deal caps a chapter about keeping physically fit with “if body image is something that you are struggling with, work even harder because I feel more fabulous than ever,” adding, “Woo-hoo!” (A few of the guide’s axioms can be unintentionally funny, as when he warns his readers: “Some friends can be toxic to you in every sense of the word.”) But the book adds to its winning approachability with plenty of photographs of the author and his friends and family, and the ultimate effect is of sitting across a table from Deal, listening to his favorite yarns.
An intimate, inviting, and accessible inventory of lessons one man learned on the road to 40.Pub Date: April 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-1800-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If Charles Reich is your bag, then this may be your book. If you want your neuroscience qua science, then head over to where...
A head-spinning guide to supercharged meditation.
If life is like a box of chocolates, to quote the philosopher Forrest Gump, then, to quote Siegel (Clinical Psychiatry/UCLA; Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human, 2016, etc.), “consciousness is like a container of water”—undrinkable if a tablespoon of salt is put into an espresso cup but just fine if the container is a bathtub. And why is it like a container of water? That’s never quite explained, except to say that cultivating the mind to maximize awareness makes our experience of things different. That heightened experience can be a deeply positive thing, for, as the author points out, neural integration makes problem solving easier, and “open awareness” boosts the immune system. Siegel delivers a “Wheel of Awareness” to visualize the process, with attention as the spoke, knowing or awareness as the hub, and “knowns” on the rim. But those knowns can be awareness-inhibiting prejudices as well as hard-won knowledge of how the world works. Siegel favors a murky, circular style: “When we open awareness to sensation, such as that of the breath, we become a conduit directing the flow of something into our awareness.” Well, yes, that’s how breath works, but Siegel means something different—“enabling the sensation of the breath at the nostrils to flow into consciousness.” Further along, the author complicates the picture: “And so both focal attention involving consciousness and nonfocal attention without consciousness involve an evaluative process that places meaning and significance on energy patterns and their informational value as they arise moment by moment.” Can there be meaning without consciousness? That’s a question for Heidegger, but suffice it to say that it’s a clear if empty statement relative to the main, which is laden with jargon, neologisms (“plane-dominant sweep”; “SOCK: sensation, observation, conceptualization, and knowing”), and lots of New Age cheerleading.
If Charles Reich is your bag, then this may be your book. If you want your neuroscience qua science, then head over to where Damasio and Dennett are shelved.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-99304-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
A moving account by renowned English medium Altea of her life, her preternatural gifts, and the meaning that she sees in these for herself and others. From earliest childhood, Altea heard strange voices and saw terrifying faces at night. Lonely and rejected by her unhappily married parents, who often beat her, she was haunted by the fear that she was mad. She grew up in poor health with the one desire to pass as a normal person. Even this was finally denied her when, toward the end of her own disastrous marriage, she came into contact with Spiritualists in 1980 and learned to develop rather than resist her psychic powers. The turning point came in her first encounter with Grey Eagle, her Apache spirit guide. Altea recounts many fascinating stories of contact with the dead that seem to defy ordinary understanding. She explains that in a trance the medium vacates her body so that it can be used by a spiritual entity. The purpose is not only to console the living but also to help the departed, who somehow need to communicate and, in extreme cases, to relive and accept their actual death experience, as in the case of a woman who had been buried alive. Although Altea reproduces many of the stock themes of Spiritualist literature and sometimes lapses into moralizing, her true contribution here is the heroic story of her own ``blossoming'' into life and establishing centers where people can receive spiritual and psychic healings. The author's simplicity and patent sincerity will warm the hearts of readers who reserve judgment on Spiritualist phenomena. (Book-of-the-Month Club featured alternate; Quality Paperback Book Club selection; author tour)
Pub Date: May 19, 1995
ISBN: 0-446-51969-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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