Read Samuel Johnson instead.
A well-meaning but not especially insightful guide to deriving greater satisfaction in life by feeling “more at home, at home.”
In this sequel to her bestselling The Happiness Project (2009), Rubin explores some of the elements that influence happiness in domestic contexts. After being inexplicably “hit by an intense wave of homesickness” in the well-ordered world of her New York apartment, she created a plan to examine the concepts she saw as inextricably linked to her own personal satisfaction. “I took my circumstances for granted,” she writes. “[I] wanted to appreciate my life more, and to live up to it better.” Rubin began her learning project in September, just as her children were going back to school. She first took account of her possessions and the relationship she had to them and discovered that her material happiness came from wanting what she had rather than making efforts to have more or less. Rubin reached similarly mundane conclusions about other concepts in the months that followed. Marriage, family and parenthood took work, and time management was as essential as determining how to most meaningfully use it. Taking care of herself and feeling good were important because how she behaved influenced the happiness of those around her, and staying mindful of the present was the key to appreciating just “how fleeting [and] how precious” her seemingly ordinary days actually were. Rubin's aim is clearly to help people enhance their relationship to all things domestic, but the portrait of her privileged, relatively trouble-free home, along with the earnestness with which she speaks of being a “moral essayist” interested in delineating “the practice of everyday life,” make her look out of touch.
Read Samuel Johnson instead.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-88678-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
PROFILES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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