Open-minded, uplifting exploration.
A businessman and former U.S. Marine shares his reflections on embracing a spiritual philosophy of life in this debut poetry collection.
“I will never be able to prove my answers to someone. But I can develop a personal belief system that gives me purpose, hope, satisfaction, happiness, and a sense of serene fearlessness.” So concludes “My Simple Questions,” the first of a series of generally one-page contemplations on what Billings terms “serentrepidism”—the act of being serene as well as intrepid in dealing with life. Other entries include “The Perfection of Imperfection,” in which the author notes, “I believe imperfection is allowed in the world to give me purpose, to give me motivation, and to give me opportunities to help others.” Although the author repeatedly mentions his belief in God, he also expresses other, nuanced thoughts regarding religion, as in “Don’t Pray for Me,” in which he says that he’d rather that a person “do something for me,” such as an act of kindness, and “Can I Be Half Christian?” in which he states, “I believe humans made Jesus divine after his death” but that Christianity still offers “one of the best moral philosophies on living.” He separates his reflections with dedicated pages of quotations, highlighting the wisdom of well-known figures (journalist Dorothy Thompson, Confucius, and others) as well as Josh Billings, one of the author’s relatives. Throughout the book, Billings effectively showcases his appealing, affirmative perspectives. By being more inquiring than dogmatic, he delivers on his promise to make his musings serve the purpose of “provoking deeper thought and help in developing more acute critical thinking skills.” His essay-poems are both sweet and artful, with some catchy titles (such as “My Bible Died”) and powerful use of repetition; many lines in “I Control Me,” for example, begin with “I refuse to allow….” None of what the author discusses is particularly new or earth-shattering, but he certainly presents a worldview worth having.
Open-minded, uplifting exploration.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5368-9695-4
Page Count: 210
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2016
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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