A lively and engaging, if occasionally bombastic, read; shows solid insight into human nature, but leaves any personal angst...
A self-help guide focuses on exploring one’s own foibles.
“Telling it to you straight” is a phrase that could well apply to this work by self-help book author Doepker (The Healthy Habit Revolution, 2014, etc.). One short, punchy chapter after another brims with rapid-fire advice about how to stop falling prey to internal fears and psychological hurdles. Doepker is relentless at tossing out such nuggets as “Pride is the ultimate impediment to reaching your potential,” “Separate your future possibilities from your current reality, and you’ll have countless options to choose,” and “The longest relationship you’re ever going to have is with yourself.” Much of the book’s content cogently addresses the manner in which just about everybody is, at least to some extent, self-delusional. It also points to the inadequacies, failings, and lack of confidence that may impede people from reaching their highest potential. Still, for those seeking a clear path to self-reliance and self-respect, this volume offers no easy fix. Instead, the author quite intentionally wrestles with issues (including right vs. wrong) and exposes gray areas between the black and white. He even occasionally steps outside himself and engages in a dialogue with his own mind. As he explains, “Do I try to argue with my mind and make it wrong, or do I appreciate what it has to share? I may simply tell my mind, ‘Thank you for sharing,’ and then move on. I don’t make it ‘bad’ or ‘wrong.’ ” This notion may be the most intriguing, and for some, unsettling part of this artfully written book; Doepker works hard to keep his own moral judgments outside his purview. What’s more, he admits his goal is to leave one “with more questions than answers.” A tendency toward good-humored vulgarity, tongue-in-cheek verbiage, and silly hashtags could leave some feeling the volume may have been written more as a creative exercise to shock and amuse than to enlighten.
A lively and engaging, if occasionally bombastic, read; shows solid insight into human nature, but leaves any personal angst and uncertainty for the reader to resolve.Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5228-7983-1
Page Count: 316
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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
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