A practical and engagingly written guidebook to embodying peace in one’s daily life.
In this self-help book, two experts on personal development highlight ways to practice peace daily.
“Peace is not something we wait for,” life coaches Hamilton-Guarino and Eastman point out in the book’s introduction, adding that it is instead “something we practice—every day, in every interaction, in every breath.” The authors challenge popular misconceptions of peace that relegate it to an abstract ideal, reduce it to passive inaction, or defer its value onto others, and they argue that it begins inside oneself and in one’s interactions with family members, colleagues, and communities. Central to the book’s convincing premise is that peace starts with compassion (“When you commit to practicing compassion,” they write, “you promote peace”), and that actively choosing compassion not only helps bring inner peace, but is also a contribution to global peace movements. As a guidebook, the volume provides pragmatic advice, often in bulleted lists, on how to embrace its central concept, while emphasizing that it requires constant vigilance and patience. A wealth of practical ancillaries includes journaling prompts (included on lined paper throughout the book), real-world exercises to help break an “autopilot cycle” in stressful situations, and prompts for group discussions. There are memoiristic vignettes from the authors’ own lives, as well as inspirational stories contributed by people they’ve encountered as life coaches, licensed therapists, and motivational speakers. Hamilton-Guarino, a bestselling author of nearly a dozen works, joins Eastman, whose academic background is in clinical psychology, for this book; the pair, who previously worked together on Percolate: Let Your Best Self Filter Through (2014), are particularly adept at blending a welcoming, personable writing style with a solid understanding of best practices in contemporary psychology and peace theory that’s backed by scholarly references. Although the authors’ overall goal of a more peaceful world is admirable, they’re also careful to emphasize that the book “doesn’t ask for perfection.” Instead, it effectively encourages readers to contribute to this goal—one small change and action at a time.
A practical and engagingly written guidebook to embodying peace in one’s daily life.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780757326080
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Health Communications Inc.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
