A practical, inspiring primer to assess and address one’s particular emotional requirements.
In this self-help guide, a communication expert details the effects of “affection hunger” and strategies to make more meaningful connections.
Floyd (Human Communication/Arizona State Univ.) notes that more and more people feel like they’re not getting as much affection as they need—they hunger, he says, for more quality human interaction. He asserts that the rise of social media, while offering some communal benefits, is largely making things worse, creating a “pseudo-intimacy.” He then details how affection deprivation causes an array of mental and physical problems, including weakened immune systems, higher cortisol/stress levels, and self-destructive behaviors. The book offers examples and anecdotes, including some from Floyd’s own “affection lab” studies. He recommends that everyone should determine his or her own affection needs and tackle his or her loneliness issues. He offers six strategies for this purpose: assess one’s fears in accepting affection; invite and model, rather than demand, the kind of relationships one seeks; recognize that others may express affection differently (many men, for example, express it by doing tasks); nurture a variety of affectionate relationships; be alert to “toxic affection” practitioners; and lastly, be optimistic yet realistic, as relationships will have ups and downs. Debut author Floyd is certainly not the first to spotlight the reality and consequences of increasing disconnection in our society, but he offers clear, simple, and very welcome direction on what to do about it on a grass-roots, personal level. He offers his advice in warm, relatable fashion, wryly acknowledging his own affection tendencies and needs: “When my colleague put her arms around me in the hallway, it didn’t change anything about what had gone wrong in my day. However, it changed everything about the way I felt.” He also sprinkles helpful “Try This” suggestions and “Stop and Reflect” self-evaluation questions throughout his text.
A practical, inspiring primer to assess and address one’s particular emotional requirements.Pub Date: May 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4405-8209-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Adams Media
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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