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
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
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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