Of minimal interest considering the many better books on the subject already on the market.
A minimalist guru delivers a tepid discussion of remaking one’s rotten behavior.
“I think this is going to be the last ‘self-help’ book for me,” writes Sasaki, who, some 270 winding pages later, announces that his next book is tentatively titled Quit Alcohol in a Fun Way. Much of the reform he urges in this book about forming better habits involves just that, though it’s rarely much fun. “I didn’t decide to quit drinking because I understood the disadvantages of drinking,” he writes, “it was because I had personally accumulated a lot of experiences of regret.” One of those regrets, it seems, is one that the author, who is unmarried and lives alone in a tiny apartment, does not share—namely, the daily grind of paying for a child’s education or a car bought on installments, which he considers an exercise in poor prioritization. “We then have to sacrifice our precious sleep,” he sighs, “and work to earn money to pay those costs.” Sasaki blends jargon (rational thought is a “cool system,” emotion a hot one) with a few observations from science, as when he notes that remaking habitual behavior is largely unconscious activity: We do what we do in order to receive the psychic reward of dopamine. We also throw up roadblocks to reforming ourselves by pretending something untoward never happened or “thinking that it’s too late to start.” The best parts of the book are glosses on others’ thoughts, notably those of a certain renowned novelist: “As mentioned before, when working on long novels, Haruki Murakami writes ten pages every day and never misses his hour of running or swimming”; he “says that although he runs for an hour each day, he runs for a little bit longer when he receives unwarranted criticism or a rejection from someone.” Pass on this one and turn to Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit or Wendy Wood’s Good Habits, Bad Habits instead.
Of minimal interest considering the many better books on the subject already on the market.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-324-00558-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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