A sweeping and empathetic call for people to teach themselves how to relax.
A game plan for slowing down and taking breaks in a busy world.
In her nonfiction debut, entrepreneur Nguyen urges her readers to stop, take stock, and give themselves a break now and then. “If you’ve been beating yourself up most of your life, ask yourself this: What if you approached it differently?” she asks. “What if you gave yourself permission to be where you are, right now?” In these pages, she lays out several approaches to building self-esteem and relaxing the constant pressure of our internal critics, advising her readers to identify their own strengths and weaknesses in order to create a “North Star statement” for their lives that will reflect their own core values. In the face of modern society’s increasing demand for nonstop productivity, she advocates self-care and career breaks to help reset. The author herself left a high-pressure corporate job, and she relates stories of others who’ve taken much-needed breaks. “I see you,” she writes to such people. “You laugh off the memes of corporate America, of exhaustion and the cats clicking away at their computers … and slowly it all erodes your spirit and your soul.” In a series of well-designed and fast-paced chapters (complete with bullet-pointed “bite-size breaks”), Nguyen lays out an array of tactics designed to reclaim inner peace. She’s unfailingly upbeat and realistic, particularly when it comes to her advocacy of meditation; the author approaches this subject with plenty of experience-born advice for newcomers to the practice, assuring them that “depending on what you need and how much time you have, there is a conscious breathwork technique that can work for you.” She also champions such common sense measures as getting plenty of good regular sleep, reading fun books, learning a musical instrument, and cooking healthy meals—a broad enough spectrum to win over a great many overworked readers.
A sweeping and empathetic call for people to teach themselves how to relax.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781685557324
Page Count: 232
Publisher: The Collective Book Studio
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2024
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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