A joyful book that will appeal most to self-help enthusiasts, but some tips may resonate with a broader audience.
Lee’s (Chance, 2017, etc.) newest entry in his Body & Brain series discusses the benefits of devoting what he calls the “second half” of life (from age 60 to 120) to the betterment of the Earth and mankind.
Korean-born Lee has spent most of his life studying and teaching self-actualization, and his Body & Brain Yoga and Brain Education seminars have taken him around the world. His teachings, he says, are based on “Sundo, a traditional Korean system of mind-body training.” Now in his late 60s, Lee says that he has found a new purpose: he suggests that one can “decide” to live to be 100, or even 120. With this mindset, he asserts, one can face later stages of life with enthusiasm for how much can still be accomplished rather than with fear of old age: “the second half of life, more than any other time, is optimal for finding and realizing that [true] self.” His current project is Earth Village, a retreat that he founded in a region of the North Island of New Zealand. He describes it as “a residential school and community...where hundreds of people can experience a self-reliant, earth-friendly lifestyle in a place where humans and nature live in harmony.” In articulate, well-organized prose, Lee ebulliently shares his methods for overcoming life’s stumbling blocks, be they external or emotional. For example, here’s how he describes a meditation exercise to release the soul from weighty baggage that’s been collecting over the years: “Feel the ardent desire to become a free soul, and feel only that desire. Feel the earnest desire in your heart to soar freely in the heavens, like a bird.” His lifestyle and training methods for maintaining a healthy brain as one ages effectively focus on a critical element: hope, which he calls “Vitamin H.”
A joyful book that will appeal most to self-help enthusiasts, but some tips may resonate with a broader audience.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-935127-99-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Best Life Media
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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