For self-help fans and seekers of self-empowerment, this is an inspiring memoir with tips for overcoming and maybe...
An inspirational speaker and yoga instructor shares her life story along with motivational tips and exercises from her popular workshops.
Over the past several years, Pastiloff has built an abundant international following for her On Being Human workshops, inspiring retreat gatherings in which she offers a fusion of yoga movement, motivational writing, and communal sharing. In her debut memoir, she digs into the significant life events that led her to this unusual entrepreneurial opportunity. She reflects on childhood and family dynamics, personal losses, past boyfriends, her struggles with depression and increasing hearing loss, and day-to-day encounters while waitressing at a restaurant in Los Angeles. Though her career steps may seem unremarkable on the surface, the author stresses her evolving talent for remaining receptive and present throughout these experiences, enabling her to recognize beautiful moments as they occur. “It was there at the restaurant that I first began to pay attention to the beauty, because if I hadn’t, I would surely have killed myself,” she writes. “The landscape of self-loathing I traversed was so treacherous that the only thing that could have possibly saved me were those moments of beauty I hunted—accidentally at first, and then deliberately, and in earnest.” In recounting her stories and her various emotional states, Pastiloff’s prose is occasionally overwrought. Though her followers will surely relate to most of the author’s stories, newcomers may find her style heavy-handed. Eventually, after training to become a yoga instructor, Pastiloff began to find her calling, and elements of her platform emerged. At this midway point in the text, the narrative gains more energy and substance. Though still reliant on feel-good aphorisms—chapter headings include “Embracing Change” and “Make Room for the Possible and the Impossible”—the author ultimately clearly conveys her authentic intentions. By the end, many readers will admire her tenacity and open-hearted mission.
For self-help fans and seekers of self-empowerment, this is an inspiring memoir with tips for overcoming and maybe prospering from the chaotic or disappointing elements that comprise an imperfect life.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4356-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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