A useful grief guide with groundbreaking ideas, expert advice and a compassionate tone.
Combs offers a practical guidebook for coping with setbacks and loss.
Combs (Worst Enemy, Best Teacher, 2005, etc.) uses her extensive experience with cross-cultural conflict resolution to explore ways to survive tough times, even if they feel like conflicts “with the gods.” Although her expertise is evident, she avoids unnecessary jargon and offers down-to-earth, realistic advice that can be used in most difficult situations. Her humor and the sensibleness of her suggestions elevate this work above many in the self-help genre; not only is it useful, it’s a pleasure to read. Combs makes the innovative argument that people may be using excellent techniques to cope with grief, but they’ll still likely fail if they’re using those techniques at the wrong time. Thus, the organization of the book divides difficult times into four seasons, emphasizing that the best coping strategies for one season are not necessarily appropriate for the other seasons. The cycle begins with autumn, when things that have been cherished or people who have been loved “fall” away. Autumn is also the season for envisioning positive consequences, perhaps using a mantra or prayer to increase focus on those potential outcomes. And although American culture emphasizes action and confronting problems head-on, Combs cautions that during winter, people need to rest and gather strength. In spring, celebration and ritual are important in order to mark the ending of one phase of life and the transition to another. Summer represents the cycle’s end, when people are ready to move forward from their difficult circumstances and re-engage fully in life and relationships. In her discussion of each season, Combs offers specific recommendations for how to best cope with the emotions and tasks of that season. She provides multiple examples from countries and cultures, and she enlivens the text further with quotations from people of various ages, ethnicities, eras and professions. The uplifting conclusion is both a summary and inspiration.
A useful grief guide with groundbreaking ideas, expert advice and a compassionate tone.Pub Date: July 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1466202993
Page Count: 210
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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