A practical handbook for women seeking to restore damaged beliefs about themselves.
An autobiographical approach to reflection and self-improvement.
Storytelling is a key element of this innovative self-help manual, which encourages women of all ages to forgive themselves and create healthier life narratives. The book is divided into five parts, starting with a section on the past and the ways that “cultural programming” shapes one’s early perceptions. This is followed by sections on the present and the future, another directed mainly at mothers, and a final part centered on the author’s own story. The overall style is refreshingly old-fashioned and epistolary, featuring letters written by women to their younger selves. Consultant Chelli Wolford, for instance, writes: “Learn to forgive as if it were your job. Forgive those who have hurt you, and forgive yourself for those you have hurt.” Schneider ends each section with open calls to readers called “Do the Work,” in which she distills various lessons into questions and encourages free-writing about self-love, forgiveness, and finding one’s inner worth. “We wrap our lives around the sins of others,” she writes at one point, but she also urges readers to remember the magic in their hearts. It all culminates in ringing affirmations to Schneider’s younger self (“You have bones of steel and the blood of a warrior, and your heart and mind are diamonds”). This self-help work’s combination of workbook activities and lesson-giving retrospectives is cumulatively effective, and the author usefully stresses the value of writing throughout. Many readers have thought at one point or another, “If I only knew then what I know now.” Schneider’s choice to use this wistful what-if as a springboard for self-evaluation is an inspired one.
A practical handbook for women seeking to restore damaged beliefs about themselves.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982201-54-8
Page Count: 258
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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