Psychiatrist Sharp (Harvard Medical School) provides a guide to understanding how seasons, events and anniversaries work together to affect human emotions.
In simple, concise language, the author examines how seasonal changes, along with environmental factors—light and dark, hot and cold, wind and storms—can impact moods and behavior. He grounds his argument in the fact that human physiology is highly sensitive to the physical world. Even the smallest variations in external conditions affect everything from the respiratory system to blood pressure to hormone secretions. Sharp also suggests that culturally ingrained seasonal expectations—renewal (spring), relaxation (summer), work (fall) and darkness/death (winter)—can aggravate or enhance the physiological changes brought about by the environment. Further complicating how an individual feels on a given day or during a particular period are memories from years past of that same day or period. Through carefully delineated case studies, the author shows how events or anniversaries on the cultural calendar (from the beginning of the baseball season to the first day of school to the Christmas holidays) or on a more personal one (birthdays, wedding anniversaries, death dates) can become especially fraught times. These external and internal influences combine to create what Sharp calls “emotional calendars,” which, unlike paper calendars, are unique to each person. To find the inner balance necessary for mental and physical well-being, individuals must understand how external conditions, working alone or in tandem with event-memories, can create “emotional hotspots” in a given year and lead to negative or positive patterns of behavior over time. Sharp’s great strength is his genuine concern with moving beyond definitions and fostering awareness in readers about their own emotional calendars. However, while he provides useful “emotional hotspot” coping strategies, he does not do so in the same illustrative detail that characterizes other parts of his argument. Nonetheless, Sharp offers an interesting and original way to think about the underpinnings of psychological health.
Perceptive and useful.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9130-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
Categories: SELF-HELP
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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 31, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Categories: PSYCHOLOGY | SELF-HELP
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The queen of Thursday night TV delivers a sincere and inspiring account of saying yes to life.
Rhimes, the brain behind hits like Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, is an introvert. She describes herself as a young girl, playing alone in the pantry, making up soap-opera script stories to act out with the canned goods. Speaking in public terrified her; going to events exhausted her. She was always busy, and she didn’t have enough time for her daughters. One Thanksgiving changed it all: when her sister observed that she never said “yes” to anything, Rhimes took it as a challenge. She started, among other things, accepting invitations, facing unpleasant conversations, and playing with her children whenever they asked. The result was a year of challenges and self-discovery that led to a fundamental shift in how she lives her life. Rhimes tells us all about it in the speedy, smart style of her much-loved TV shows. She’s warm, eminently relatable, and funny. We get an idea of what it’s like to be a successful TV writer and producer, to be the ruler of Shondaland, but the focus is squarely on the lessons one can learn from saying yes rather than shying away. Saying no was easy, Rhimes writes. It was comfortable, “a way to disappear.” But after her year, no matter how tempting it is, “I can no longer allow myself to say no. No is no longer in my vocabulary.” The book is a fast read—readers could finish it in the time it takes to watch a full lineup of her Thursday night programing—but it’s not insubstantial. Like a cashmere shawl you pack just in case, Year of Yes is well worth the purse space, and it would make an equally great gift.
Rhimes said “yes” to sharing her insights. Following her may not land you on the cover of a magazine, but you’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7709-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2015
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