This fast-paced, upbeat call for concentrating on the positive should appeal to manifesting fans.
A writer looks at using the power of focus to manifest benefits in daily life.
The central conceit of Brennan’s slim nonfiction book is the idea of employing passion and focus as fertilizer in order to prime the soil of daily life to grow the qualities each person wants. “Simply by being aware of where we place our focus, we can contribute to the reality we are growing,” she writes, “which is why focus is fertiliser.” A key to priming this process is shifting the need for external validation to internal confirmation and concentrating on the specific object in mind, then determining whether the focus involved is positive or negative. Finally, readers should examine the direction of the focus: Is it internal or external? Brennan advocates marshaling internal processes of attention, presence, and appreciation in order to build the concentration required to create this personal fertilizer. “If we focus on the object of our task—our success,” she writes, “we can demonstrate our passion and effectiveness, and others will believe our intentions.” The main problem Brennan addresses throughout is the risk of a disconnection between the inner self and the outer realities—hence, the vital need for focus. “If we are not connected to our self and the moment,” she writes, “we are not able to access our highest potential, which includes creativity, resourcefulness, and resilience.” The narrative the author presents is compassionate and warmly autobiographical; she stresses that it’s never been more important to be in the present moment than in the midst of Covid-19 and all its accompanying tensions. Readers unfamiliar with the whole subculture of “manifesting” will find some of Brennan’s assertions bewildering, as when she asserts that “the human brain does not understand the difference between positive and negative” or when she echoes the sentiment that “our experiences are the results of our thoughts and feelings.” But manifesting aficionados will find the author good company.
This fast-paced, upbeat call for concentrating on the positive should appeal to manifesting fans.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5043-2406-9
Page Count: 100
Publisher: BalboaPressAU
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2021
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
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
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