A creative, solution-filled book about restoring rest, health, and vitality to one’s life.
This short guide to a healthier, more relaxed, and balanced lifestyle posits strategies that are easy and memorable.
Acupuncturist and Chinese-medicine practitioner Kearney is a well-educated and experienced author with a message. In this text, he presents his own journey of healing personal ailments, such as a stutter and anxiety, through practices such as meditation, stretching, and controlled breathing. He presents a well-organized, well-researched text containing empowering solutions for stress, depression, and a host of other physical issues. With endorsements from such household names as Ringo Starr, Kearney suggests simple tactics, including mindful breathing, pausing, and using humor, to ground oneself in the present moment. In a humorous anecdote that explains the book’s odd title, the author describes the mantra, “Just Chaaa,” as a memorable, universal idea of relaxing, accepting the present, and releasing the need to control external factors. The book is also full of intriguing perspectives on biology. For example, the author states that the human eye was designed to view the horizon and wide-open space; thus, he says, bodily alignment, lifted stature, and an open gaze help restore the body to its natural, relaxed state. It’s easy to see why contemporary practices, such as long hours at a computer or lying on a couch watching television, wouldn’t signal the body to relax in the same way that engagement with nature on a trail, beach, or an open field might. What sets this book apart from other self-improvement texts is its innovative approaches: “walking breath,” “slow power,” and resting before sleep are just a few of the ideas that are easy to try right away, and the author takes the time and care to explain the science and rationale behind each practice. In one example, Kearney suggests using the fingertips to apply pressure to certain points of the body in order to bring energy into these places. Overall, this book is a breath of fresh air to the self-improvement genre.
A creative, solution-filled book about restoring rest, health, and vitality to one’s life.Pub Date: June 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5123-8749-0
Page Count: 140
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.
The renowned writer offers advice on information-gathering and nonfiction composition.
The book consists of eight instructive and charming essays about creating narratives, all of them originally composed for the New Yorker, where McPhee (Silk Parachute, 2010, etc.) has been a contributor since the mid-1960s. Reading them consecutively in one volume constitutes a master class in writing, as the author clearly demonstrates why he has taught so successfully part-time for decades at Princeton University. In one of the essays, McPhee focuses on the personalities and skills of editors and publishers for whom he has worked, and his descriptions of those men and women are insightful and delightful. The main personality throughout the collection, though, is McPhee himself. He is frequently self-deprecating, occasionally openly proud of his accomplishments, and never boring. In his magazine articles and the books resulting from them, McPhee rarely injects himself except superficially. Within these essays, he offers a departure by revealing quite a bit about his journalism, his teaching life, and daughters, two of whom write professionally. Throughout the collection, there emerge passages of sly, subtle humor, a quality often absent in McPhee’s lengthy magazine pieces. Since some subjects are so weighty—especially those dealing with geology—the writing can seem dry. There is no dry prose here, however. Almost every sentence sparkles, with wordplay evident throughout. Another bonus is the detailed explanation of how McPhee decided to tackle certain topics and then how he chose to structure the resulting pieces. Readers already familiar with the author’s masterpieces—e.g., Levels of the Game, Encounters with the Archdruid, Looking for a Ship, Uncommon Carriers, Oranges, and Coming into the Country—will feel especially fulfilled by McPhee’s discussions of the specifics from his many books.
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-14274-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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