A well-researched and well-designed call to embrace awkwardness.
Pryor outlines a strategy to make awkwardness work to your advantage in this self-help book.
In her nonfiction debut, the author, a workplace performance expert, speaker, and executive coach, explores the nature of feeling awkward, questioning where it comes from and observing how people typically react to it. Pryor likens the sensation to a balancing act, with risk tolerance on one side and confidence, experience, and, especially, conformity on the other. The fulcrum is a quality the author refers to as “EEE”: Easily Empathetically Embarrassed. Consulting a wide array of works, from self-help books to psychological and anthropological studies, Pryor outlines the ubiquitous nature of awkwardness in modern society (“Even if you’ve lived a pretty charmed life with relatively few uncertainties,” she writes, referring to the Covid-19 pandemic, “the beginning of 2020 blew up that track record for every damn one of us”). She notes the high social costs associated with awkwardness (“we avoid it like the plague and work hard to eliminate it at all costs”), but she insists that embracing awkwardness is perfectly natural, even on an evolutionary level—she asserts that if somebody feels awkward in a social interaction they should give their brain “a little nod of gratitude” because registering wary awkwardness in such circumstances is exactly what the brain’s designed to do.
In the course of fluidly readable chapters full of insets and numbered points, the author lays out dozens of approaches to dealing with the “mental blocks” that people tend to put up in their own minds regarding awkward moments or situations. Throughout the text, Pryor takes an easy-going, approachable stance, regularly assuring her readers that she herself has a long history with awkwardness, asserting that if she can work through some of the most self-defeating aspects of it, so can they. At every point, she stresses that awkwardness is a natural reaction to uncertain situations; she contrasts this with overconfidence, which the author identifies as a weakness. “Feeling awkward means you’re taking chances,” she writes in a typically encouraging line, “and I love that look on you.” She reassures her readers that the judgment of others is seldom as bad as people think it is, owing to a psychological phenomenon known as “the illusion of transparency”—in reality, others can’t read our insecurities as well as we assume they can. Pryor is wonderfully convincing when pointing out how much of a difference that knowledge should make to how self-critical we are—as she spicily puts it, “Most people don’t give a rat’s arse about how you look or what you’re doing.” Pryor notes that due to social media’s amplifying effect, we now live in an era of “cringe,” when it seems like the slightest awkward moment will be broadcast around the world. The author also argues that “bravery requires being off balance,” and that real growth can be achieved only by occasionally feeling the awkwardness of not knowing what you’re doing. For many readers accustomed to the relentless cool-scrutiny of our online world, Pryor’s warm, intelligent reassurances will be much appreciated.
A well-researched and well-designed call to embrace awkwardness.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 978-1646871452
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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