A book with a pure heart but inadequate guidance.
Hepker explores what it means to live the good life and how one can achieve it.
These eternal questions, which extend back to the ancient Greeks and live on to the present day, lie at the heart of Hepker’s thin treatise based on the Bright Beautiful School of Thought, a 1600-year-old philosophical tradition. Hepker, who holds a doctorate in psychology, argues that “True Health,” the telos of good living, can be achieved through exercising other truths (responsibility, effort, etc.) in our dealings with others and ourselves. For instance, personal benefit maximizes when individuals perform good deeds for their own sake without the expectation of reward or recognition. To live healthily starts with the individual, who can increase his or her well-being by taking personal responsibility to rectify bad habits, extreme types of behavior (e.g., greed and hatred) and a lack of self-awareness. Much of this would appear obvious at first glance, and in reading this book, one maintains the position; while totaling just over 100 pages, Hepker’s work becomes increasingly repetitive. Yet the most disappointing aspect of the work revolves around its lack of contextualization. Hepker includes several personal anecdotes that seem altogether out-of-place, but he doesn’t make an attempt to place the larger work in the context of modern life. Nor does he offer many real-life parallels or applications to the theories he describes. Indeed, for a book that talks about “life,” there is a significant lack of it unless it relates to the author. Hepker concludes the book by asserting that “it is difficult to fairly and scrupulously find fault with the notion” that each person is responsible for making the world a better place. As right as Hepker may be, this outlook proves easier said than done, and the laundry list of aphorisms that flood Hepker’s book do not alleviate the issues he raises.
A book with a pure heart but inadequate guidance.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463687120
Page Count: 120
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
