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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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
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