A reassuring but disappointingly brief guide to centering oneself.
An overview of various Buddhism-infused mindfulness practices.
Barnhardt, a professor emeritus at Boise State University, structures his nonfiction debut around practices that he awkwardly calls “Daily RICH-U-ALLS”; he gave the concept this name “because it enriches (RICH) me (U) and (ALL) those around me.” He then provides readers with a broad-spectrum approach to finding inner peace. He notes that the more that he practiced mindfulness, the happier he became, and he arranges the chapters of his book by pairing mindfulness exercises with ample open space for readers to write their own reflections. The exercises tend to be fairly straightforward, asking questions such as “What don’t you love about yourself?” and “What are the obstacles that are standing in your way to exhibit kindness?” The author grounds many of his mindfulness precepts in visions of real-world equality, as achieved through activities such as the Blue Zones Project, which aims to encourage healthy life choices. “We stand on the scales of justice either to create greater advantage for ourselves,” he proclaims, “or to bring greater advantage to those who…have not had the good breaks in life.” Overall, Barnhardt’s narrative voice is easygoing and approachable throughout, and his manner of working references to other writers, such as Jack Kornfield or Nisargadatta Maharaj, into his text is effectively casual. He champions some aspects of mindfulness that will be very familiar to readers of the self-help genre, such as self-assessment and heightening one’s awareness of one’s impact on others. However, his calm enthusiasm in presenting them will pleasantly carry readers along. Indeed, they may wish that the author had included more of his own observations rather than giving over so much of his book to lined pages for readers’ responses.
A reassuring but disappointingly brief guide to centering oneself.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-72837-198-6
Page Count: 174
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2020
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
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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