An enthusiastic, often successful outline for forming habits conducive to mindfulness.
An engineer distills the life advice he has absorbed from noted spiritual thinkers.
Drawing heavily on the work of Eckhart Tolle and Wayne Dyer, Rossi condenses the lessons he learned in a time of personal and professional upheaval in this debut self-help book. Rossi’s one complaint about the books that helped him to learn mindfulness, develop acceptance, and change his thought processes is “the lack of a prescribed ‘practice’ or steps to follow to instill into our life the excellent teaching the books espoused.” The foundation of his approach involves developing “the imperative habit,” Rossi’s term for the seven concrete skills—acceptance, not fearing the outcome, happiness as a practice, being present, not judging, responding with compassion, and having faith—the book is intended to teach. Rossi lucidly explains the psychology of conditioning behavior and developing habits, and he encourages readers to apply those techniques—for instance, asking themselves what they hope to achieve when taking a challenging class instead of assuming that they will fail—in order to make the elements of the imperative habit part of everyday life. The subjective nature of these skills, however, means that some readers may find that this book, like other similar titles, ably shows the value of mindfulness without elucidating the concept in a replicable manner. The book has its moments of dissonance (for instance, Chapter 1 opens with an apocryphal anecdote about European contact with the Americas that is weighted with stereotypes). Minor errors, like the frequent misspelling of Tolle’s first name, also detract from the book’s authoritativeness. On the whole, though, the text is highly readable, and as it takes a somewhat more practical and less metaphysical approach to mindfulness than the books Rossi draws from, it’s likely to appeal to readers who understand mindfulness but would like examples of its use and will appreciate the clear enthusiasm and focus of Rossi’s authorial voice.
An enthusiastic, often successful outline for forming habits conducive to mindfulness.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64633-584-8
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Evolve Global Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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