Filled with fun activities, this manual will help readers of all ages deal with anxiety.
An interactive guide focuses on managing anxiety.
Stress can feel overwhelming, especially for children. But with parental support, kids can learn to manage their fears, coping with strong emotions in healthy ways. Aimed at children between the ages of 8 and 12, Dessy Marinova’s manual provides valuable insights into emotional wellness for preadolescents. Asserting that stress management starts with role modeling, the author opens with a discussion about parental resilience, encompassing topics such as self-care, self-appreciation, and validation of feelings. Next, readers are led on a parent-child journey through emotional management. To serve as guides on this educational adventure, the author introduces Aimie, Brightie, and Dooie. Representing the amygdala, the region of the brain that controls the fear response, Aimie is portrayed as a protective presence. But this role can sometimes result in misguided fear reactions. Brightie, who embodies regions of the cerebral cortex, plays a part in fostering the imagination. When “enchanted” by Aimie, Brightie may deliver mental projections of worrisome thoughts. Lastly, Dooie signifies the brain’s motor responses, located in the prefrontal cortex. When influenced by signals from Aimie and Brightie, Dooie may spark such behaviors as running away and hiding from new experiences. Depicted as cute cartoon friends, these characters will help children and adults recognize and manage emotional reactions, demystifying the responses people feel to new or challenging stimuli. Designed as a workbook, the volume provides activities that encourage kids and adults to explore their reactions to stressful scenarios in their lives. Offering techniques to cope with anxiety, playfully referred to as “brain snacks,” the author coaches readers on contextualizing, managing, and releasing stressful thoughts. Presenting illustrations and insights by the author’s young daughter, Lora Marinova, the guide thoughtfully balances science and accessibility. Yet one of the work’s most beneficial elements may be its framing of anxiety as a protective response. Describing anxiety as the product of a “Super-Protective-Aimie,” the book effectively destigmatizes fear, encouraging children and adults to see stress as a normal—even positive—hormonal response, which can result in happy outcomes.
Filled with fun activities, this manual will help readers of all ages deal with anxiety.Pub Date: June 24, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-03-912085-3
Page Count: 308
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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