A comprehensive but flawed wellness manual.
Neilson’s debut holistic self-help book examines the ways that excuses can interfere with a healthy lifestyle.
The author, a personal trainer, claims that “if you have fallen short of any goal in your life, you can always trace your result back to an excuse.” Such excuses, the author asserts, come from self-sabotaging beliefs and negative conditioning, among other sources, and he emphasizes the importance of affirmations, positivity, and the act of smiling in achieving and maintaining an optimal state of health. His 60-day plan insists on adequate sleep, meditation, and hydration, and he urges readers to eat vegetables daily and reduce “time wasters.” Most of these ideas are not new, though the packaging—charts, graphs, “exorcism” activities to get rid of one’s excuses—may be. Acronyms abound, as when the author insists that readers create a “CCV” (“Crystal-Clear Vision”): a written mission statement for one’s life. He also advocates a “Triple-A Solution” comprised of awareness (acknowledging when one makes excuses), acceptance (taking ownership of the excuses), and action that opposes said excuses. Overall, this is a thought-provoking self-help book that provides an extensive plan to change unhealthy behaviors. That said, some claims are dubious, such as, “many of us believe today that we are living in the real world when we are actually living in a world created by the beliefs that we unconsciously allow into our minds.” Others are simplistic: “When you eat like crap, you feel like crap. When you feel like crap, you think like crap. When you think like crap, your life becomes crap.” It also troublingly presents statistics without any specific source: “Other highly respectable organizations have stated that up to 70 percent of cancers are preventable through healthy nutritional practices.” In addition, the frequent mentions of God in the text may not appeal to readers who don’t see exercise and eating habits as spiritual dilemmas.
A comprehensive but flawed wellness manual.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-6031-4
Page Count: 258
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017
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
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