In this manual, Ogbonna illustrates the most damaging negative emotions and supplies strategies to master them and create worthwhile opportunities from adverse feelings.
This second edition of the author’s debut book offers a well-structured set of chapters that tackle tough subjects like anger, shame, grief, jealousy, and depression. Ogbonna expertly navigates the causes and symptoms of these strong emotions, often using anecdotes to depict experiences of people who faced uncomfortable situations and harnessed the resulting emotions in a way that led to growth and positive change. In one example, the author looks at the universal trigger of criticism, spotlighting a young woman who came under the fire of internet users who ridiculed her for an accidental typo in a LinkedIn article she wrote. The book discusses how she addressed the issue openly in a brave “letter” to readers. Ogbonna describes how maintaining productive routines and having the courage to speak publicly, publish work, or express ideas often draw criticism, an unfortunate symptom of a motivated life. Handling criticism, the author explains, requires the recognition that it was the daring act of writing that invited it and that no one should regret that winning path. Later, Ogbonna focuses on jealousy and grief, deftly unpacking these broad emotions. He explores the ways in which jealousy can be healthy or destructive, depending on its manifestation. Examining sorrow, the author distinguishes anticipated grief—such as the despair experienced in the long journey of coping with a terminal illness—from shorter term grief, which occurs unexpectedly and lasts for a brief duration. One central piece of advice here is to step away from the reactions to powerful emotions to give oneself time to ruminate and mold the response into something constructive. Whether the emotion is anger or shame, the author encourages reflection and exercises to determine the best course of action. The book delivers a wealth of worthy suggestions and exercises in its final pages to deal with and release negative emotions rather than falling victim to compulsions. In the last section, Ogbonna includes several valuable self-assessment quizzes to help readers understand the emotional surroundings of their family lives and the stresses and pressures that may be contributing to harmful emotions. Overall, the book provides an excellent resource for understanding and coping with the most distressing emotions humans can endure.
A useful, upbeat, and well-organized guide to managing emotions and building resilience and strength.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5255-1327-5
Page Count: 210
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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