An enthusiastic and involving guide to helping yourself so that you can help others.
Harwood offers a wide-ranging personal growth guide.
“Growth is rarely a walk in the park,” warns the author, a longtime therapist, at the beginning of her book, adding, “But just because it’s work and not necessarily fun doesn’t mean it won’t come with a tremendous amount of fulfillment and relief.” The growth in question involves moving beyond harmful or inadequate generational strategies in dealing with a wide range of challenges, from childhood trauma to abusive relationships to financial insecurity to violence and war. Each section concentrates on a different issue and includes insets called “Trusty Tidbits” that can take the form of quick summaries or brief exercises intended to underscore the author’s discussion points (for example, “1. Find two medium-sized shoe boxes. 2. Label the first box: ‘Things I wish I had done differently’”). In addition, “Stop Signs” flag the most important warning signs under any behavioral heading. Each section also includes extensive citations for further reading. Throughout, Harwood adopts the tone of a life coach, reminding readers that everybody feels loneliness or insecurity at times and encouraging them to overcome such feelings with empathy and self-understanding. The book’s recurrent theme is that by learning adaptive new ways of thinking, adults will be better able to help kids deal with the same kinds of issues. “None of us can come to this journey fully equipped with all the knowledge and resources we need for every possible scenario we will face,” the author reminds readers, and that’s where her book comes in. The upbeat tone is the work’s strongest element; no matter how potentially dark a topic is, Harwood is quick to remind readers that they aren’t as helpless as they might feel. “We’re not all powerful,” she writes, “but nor are we ever completely void of the ability to impact our situation.” She even offers levelheaded advice about her own profession, counseling readers that they should approach finding the right therapist with much the same caution as they would finding the right dating partner.
An enthusiastic and involving guide to helping yourself so that you can help others.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781632175960
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sasquatch
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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
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