A wide-ranging and powerfully optimistic look at how individuals can change their lives.
A debut guide offers a motivational call for people to stop being victims of circumstance.
Adams opens her work with the promise that it’s “a book that teaches you how to tap into the limitless power that resides within, even when circumstances or other people present barriers outside of your control.” In response to the question “Who are you?” the author maintains that “choosing to be the answer is more important than finding it.” Nobody else in the world is you, she writes, and that is the source of your power. She points out that this can often be obscured by the daily realities her readers face. When the “locus of control” is external to ourselves, she asserts, it fosters the belief that both good and bad things are in the power of others and that we have no way to do anything about it. Citing a wide array of studies and experts, Adams lays out an elaborate refutation of this idea. She draws on figures as dissimilar as primatologist Michael Tomasello, engineer Destin Sandlin, and neuroanatomist (and author of 2009’s My Stroke of Insight) Jill Taylor to paint a far more complex and nuanced picture of how individuals form and reinforce their self-images. Throughout, the author is firmly, realistically encouraging, always aware of human fallibilities even while she’s championing inner strength. “The information we use from our past provides a snapshot in ways that aren’t necessarily knowing,” she writes, “and that’s okay.” All our lives, she points out, we go through the process of discovering and rediscovering ourselves and display a tendency to overestimate our knowledge. But she winningly, convincingly insists that rediscovering ourselves can go hand in hand with reinventing ourselves independent of the naysayers we may have around us. It’s a simple and salutary message, something that will doubtless be very galvanizing for many of her readers.
A wide-ranging and powerfully optimistic look at how individuals can change their lives.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2022
ISBN: 9798885045698
Page Count: 194
Publisher: New Degree Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2022
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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