A refreshing take on how to pursue life to the fullest.
A professional life coach uses a metaphorical journey to expound on the psychology of success.
When MacMillan (Monetize Your Message, 2015) was studying documentary filmmaking, he says, he was struck by the notion of the “Hero’s Journey,” a concept popularized by American academic Joseph Campbell. According to the author, this quest-plot structure—which was famously used as the template for Star Wars, among other films—is a metaphor for how one can discover what he calls a “true authentic life.” But to get there, he says, “you’ve got to wander through the desert of your traumas.” In this book, he does an admirable job of translating the principles of the hero’s journey into practical, modern applications for personal development. In clear, engaging text supported by useful examples from films and the real world (including his own experiences), the author walks readers through three specific phases, which he labels “The Preparation, The Journey and The Return.” A visual “map”—basically a pie chart—helpfully depicts the numerous stages of the journey, starting with a “Call to Adventure.” At first glance, this journey may appear overwhelming, but over the course of the book, MacMillan makes astute observations; he notes, for example, that a crisis can “be both danger and opportunity together” and that one’s thought processes can be seen “as the mediator through which we experience life.” The author writes with a distinctive voice in prose that’s descriptive and educational. The chapters are short but rich with detail, and the interactive exercises interspersed throughout—including such questions as “What dreams do I have, day or night, that reveal my purpose?”— are gathered in an appendix, making them easy to tackle as a single unit. A few portions of the book, such as discussions about ego and achieving an “Alpha/Theta state,” may be a bit too esoteric for some readers. Still, this book has the potential to elicit deep thought and self-reflection.
A refreshing take on how to pursue life to the fullest.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982216-43-6
Page Count: 194
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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