A provocative book that lies on the edges of the self-help universe.
Power, money, sex: Those “mitochondrial imperatives” drive us, but the shell surrounding them can be tweaked to make the ride smoother.
Life-hacking guru Asprey (Head Strong: The Bulletproof Plan to Activate Untapped Brain Energy to Work Smarter and Think Faster—in Just Two Weeks, 2017, etc.), inventor of “bulletproof coffee” and other concoctions, surveys “maverick scientists, world-class athletes, biochemists, innovative MDs, shamans, Olympic nutritionists,” and other such outlying types in order to cobble a system by which, following the rules, readers are meant to become smarter, faster, and happier. Each of those key comparatives comes with a packet of rules and exercises, the first law among which is already widespread: “Use the power of No,” meaning say no more often to the things and people that demand your time. Saying no takes many forms, including reducing the number of choices one has to make in daily life. Buy a simple wardrobe like Steve Jobs’ black turtleneck, eat the same things for breakfast, and put your elective energy into more important decisions. Asprey’s montage of pop-psych from several sources will be familiar to self-help readers (“‘Can’t’ is always a lie”; “When you label something 'bad,’ you miss out on an opportunity to figure out how it can be good”). Less run-of-the-mill is the author’s cheerleading for the use of psychotropic and nootropic drugs; his enthusiasm for LSD would cheer Timothy Leary, while he ties his advocacy of mood enhancement to mental flexibility (and, naturally, has a line of products available to seal the deal). He also advocates for other good things of life, from vitamin D3 to “conscious sex with the right people.” Traditional moralists and gym rats may find some of Asprey’s ideas unsettling, but those who are familiar with more free-form notions of life extension and biohacking will be encouraged to "stop doing the things that make you weak and start doing more of the things that will make you stronger.”
A provocative book that lies on the edges of the self-help universe.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-265244-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper Wave
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2018
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
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