A slim book with an encouraging take on failure that might have benefited from the inclusion of more actionable advice.
Failure is not defeat but a key step on the road to success and happiness, according to this self-help work.
Debut author Bankoski aims to empower people to make better decisions. Her model, which she calls the “Choice Cycle,” is drawn from the business world, but she argues that the same principles companies use to manage resources can also “influence many of our life decisions and to guide behavior to improve our lives.” Everyone draws on what resources are available to them, including money, relationships, and time, when making decisions. Bankoski breaks the decision process down into five stages: “pause,” “learn,” “act,” “correct,” “control,” and “confess.” After one’s resources are depleted without success, one must admit failure and begin the process again, she says. But although failure is seen by most as something to avoid, Bankoski views it as a key part of the Choice Cycle and a necessary prerequisite to joy, which comes when one finally recognizes “that there are new opportunities for success.” The author’s effort to redefine failure in a positive light, while not unique, may cheer readers who become discouraged when things don’t work out in their lives. In her introduction, she frames her book as a general self-help guide for people looking to improve their lives, but at times, it reads more like a resource for managers and business owners, as when the author points out that “Organizations function best when the vision, mission, and values are written to be clear to all, shared and understood.” The illustrations, while helpful in visualizing the different parts of the Choice Cycle, also look very much like a PowerPoint presentation. More concrete examples of people achieving “joy after failure” would have been welcome as well. However, Bankoski hits her stride in the final chapter, when she makes an impassioned call for people to band together to change old habits and end old prejudices.
A slim book with an encouraging take on failure that might have benefited from the inclusion of more actionable advice.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-973637-00-4
Page Count: 67
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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
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