Encouraging and strategic but not always pragmatic.
A certified master coach and CEO of The Best You Network shares best practices for overcoming adversity and creating positive change.
Hamilton-Guarino has helped thousands of clients live richer, more authentic lives by cultivating a change mindset, and here, she outlines the techniques she has refined throughout her career. “True change happens when you align your heart, your truths, and your energy,” she says. Over the course of 10 chapters with titles like “Assess,” “Implement,” and “Master,” Hamilton-Guarino guides readers through the process of developing new and better habits and includes a series of exercises designed to help readers define and manifest their goals. The book ends with an invitation to the reader to obtain their own master class certification. Hamilton-Guarino notes that trying to adopt new behaviors that aren’t aligned with our values and our true desires is likely to fail, and lasting change requires hard work and conviction. She illustrates the principles she presents with anecdotes told by those who have overcome various challenges, from childhood trauma to life-threatening illness. One woman, for example, tells a story about surviving a potentially deadly incident while surfing by focusing on her strength rather than fixating on the danger. In the critical moment, she trusted her own power. Much of the guidance Hamilton-Guarino offers is useful for developing new habits, but some of it may not be realistic for all. In a chapter on discerning what we truly want, Hamilton-Guarino tells an anecdote about a client trying to decide whether he should stay in his job. When she asks him, “What does your heart say?” he responds by saying that he’s miserable. “Well,” she replies, “There is your answer.” That’s not an answer many can readily choose. And readers should know that there is a lot of talk about weight and weight loss throughout this book. That said, the exercises alone make this a serviceable guide for anyone looking for a road map to a more fulfilling life.
Encouraging and strategic but not always pragmatic.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-7573-2421-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HCI Books
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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