A thoughtful and empowering approach to helping women overcome psychological limitations.
An invitation to women to live authentically and embrace their strengths.
In this debut self-help book, Bonomi draws on both her personal history of growing up in a dysfunctional family (“I grew up trying to make sense of a world that didn’t make a lot of sense”) and her professional experiences as a psychoanalyst and sports psychologist who rides horses competitively and advises other riders. The book is targeted at female readers and encourages women to give up on perfectionism, recalibrate their internal critics, acknowledge their accomplishments, and embrace ambition. The author illustrates many of the book’s concepts with her own stories, describing how her volatile parents’ reactions taught her to deny her emotions and mold her behavior to meet their expectations—which resulted in psychological damage that she was able to overcome with the techniques and mentalities she shares here with readers. Bonomi writes with an assured tone, embodying the strength she encourages readers to develop and presenting topics lucidly and concisely, with action items made clear. The book is a quick and engaging read that offers thought-provoking possibilities and requires readers to do the heavy lifting to apply the author’s lessons to their own lives. Readers familiar with horses (and, specifically, dressage) will be best positioned to appreciate the equine-centric material that makes up much of the text, but non-equestrians will be able to follow along as well. The book is likely to appeal to fans of Katty Kay and Claire Shipman’s The Confidence Code (2014), Amy Cuddy’s Presence (2015), and Alexi Pappas’ Bravey (2021).The women featured in the book’s anecdotes are generally successful professionals, driven athletes, or both, and while those groups do make up much of the author’s clientele, the book’s thesis could have been strengthened by demonstrating how it applies to women who face structural limitations other than gender. On the whole, however, Bonomi does an effective job of showing how women often create their own roadblocks, presenting herself as one who has learned to be unblocked and is passionate about teaching others to do the same.
A thoughtful and empowering approach to helping women overcome psychological limitations.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2026
ISBN: 9781967509102
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Cheval Press
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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