Not revolutionary, but nevertheless a well-written, sensible self-help guide.
A rational, clearly outlined debut guide to recognizing and tolerating the stress of everyday life.
For years, Costa has advised people on how to manage the stresses of family, work, loss, and the little everyday annoyances whose eventual accumulation might make sufferers want to tear their hair out. Presented as a set of practical strategies to get through the day and through life, this book will set readers back on the path to resilience. Costa sums up her program in an easy-to-remember acronym: RESET—realize, energize, soothe, end unproductive thinking, and talk it out. This guide, she argues, helps us realize that “we end up putting more effort into maintaining our cars and houses and even taking care of our pets than we do ourselves. We do everything and anything but attend to our own emotional health.” In service of this attention, alongside the familiar self-help anecdotes starring friends and case examples, Costa breaks down the RESET idea into simple charts that assist the reader in recognizing his or her “recipe” for stress. For example, “tons of coffee,” no exercise, a “rocky marriage,” alcohol, and only a few hours of sleep can add up to serious mental and emotional burnout. By changing just a few behaviors, stress levels can shrink to manageable levels, which is where therapy and positive self-talk come in. For those averse to talk therapy—Costa cites men who feel they have to “tough it out”—she points out how “Therapy is no longer an excavation of childhood skeletons, but a practical, proven, powerful way to facilitate emotional health by setting and achieving goals.” Although at first the book may be overwhelming to those in the throes of major stress, Costa provides blocked-out “Bottom Line” tidbits and sections that encourage one to “Dissect and Reflect,” thus breaking up the feeling that one must embark upon a huge life overhaul all at once. While her advice may not be new, Costa’s voice and the book’s structure will be useful to readers looking for a leg up.
Not revolutionary, but nevertheless a well-written, sensible self-help guide.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4917-4757-5
Page Count: 294
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 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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