An intriguing life story effectively mixed with sports metaphor to provide useful wellness/life advice.
A founder of a nonprofit shares the guiding life principles that she discovered while learning how to ski as an adult in this debut memoir/self-help guide.
Previously a road-warrior management consultant, Guylay “opted for a career change” to spend more time at home with her young children, and she founded Nurture, a nonprofit focused on family nutrition. She and her family moved from Chicago to Sun Valley, Idaho, leading Guylay to finally commit to learning how to ski, already one of her investment banker husband’s greatest pleasures. She spends the bulk of this book discussing the life lessons, or various “mantras,” gleaned from that experience, including “change your lens on life”; “get some good boots on”; “zoom out for the best view”; and “throw yourself down the mountain,” or commit to action. In an appendix, Guylay discusses the way yoga and other mindfulness practices, including meditation, fit within her framework as well. She brings clarity and enthusiasm to her concepts, including providing bullet points at the end of each chapter to summarize how her mantras can be applied to skiing, wellness, and life, and even offers rhyming couplets—“Embrace imperfection / Failures are moments for reflection”—further encapsulating her ideas. While Guylay’s nutrition tips at times seem digressive, her passion for good nutrition is infectious. Her food groupings in “Recipe Frameworks,” designed to make cooking easier, are particularly helpful, offering readers several ways to combine a grain with a protein source, some vegetables, a healthy fat, and seasonings to make a tasty, nutritious meal. Her struggles to master skiing later in life are humorous, inspirational, and instructive. Overall, an interesting hybrid memoir/wellness tome.
An intriguing life story effectively mixed with sports metaphor to provide useful wellness/life advice.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9965328-2-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Healthy Solutions of Sun Valley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2015
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
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
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