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
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
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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