A worthy, step-by-step, Christianity-infused empowerment guide to clearing the dark thoughts out of your mind.
A debut manual offers a program to infuse an individual’s thinking with optimism.
Kirk and Linda Thomas present their work with a playful wink. The husband-and-wife team know what readers will inevitably be thinking when the term “dirty-minded” is used. Their own meaning is subtly but importantly different: They want readers to question how and to what extent they allow negativity to enter their thoughts. These pessimistic thoughts, the authors stress, are both universal and deeply damaging (“No one is immune from the obstacles created with negative self-talk”). They spend the bulk of their book explaining the program they’ve developed for dealing with such dirty thinking. The plan’s acronym, ADAPT2, is derived from a list of components: Attitude, Discipline, Action (“nothing is achieved without meaningful action to create change”), Patience, and Training. These are skills that readers need to develop just like any other. The added T—the “gold nugget” that squares the final letter—is Trust in God, the “real difference maker.” This final element pushes the work firmly into the Christian inspiration category, with the authors frequently reminding readers of the importance of “looking for God’s direction in having a strong, well-defined purpose.” Even so, the volume provides a multitude of rousing stories, many revolving around athletic triumphs and the importance of achieving small victories in order to gain a greater feeling of empowerment. The authors excel in breaking down their message into bullet points and stirring vignettes, always stressing to their readers that negativity “shouldn’t live rent-free” in their minds, whereas positivity should always be welcomed. The manual’s compartmentalized format can make the momentum of the overall narrative difficult to maintain, but the sequential breakdown of each component of ADAPT2 helps the work achieve coherence. Readers may find some of the nostrums championed in these pages a bit on the obvious side (bring a book to the waiting room of an appointment; make a mental note to call an old friend), but the underlying optimism remains infectious.
A worthy, step-by-step, Christianity-infused empowerment guide to clearing the dark thoughts out of your mind.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-2853-3
Page Count: 170
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
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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