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
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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
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