A self-help guide that’s full of practical tips and meaningful nuggets of positive wisdom.
An activist and writer shares her tools for overcoming adversity and living a meaningful life.
Topf (You Are Not Your Illness, 1995) expands on the practical advice and wisdom that she began outlining in her previous book. The author has been a multiple sclerosis patient since 1981, and is a prominent activist for disability rights, as well as an ordained minister. The interplay of these roles makes for compelling reading, as Topf alternates between memoir, concrete self-help steps (“Unconditional cooperation with whatever is happening is one of the keys to creating happiness and well-being”) and meditative suggestions for coping with adversity. The author is obviously a professional, both as a writer and as a guide through thorny, difficult health issues, and this works to the book’s benefit. It’s very clearly structured into discrete sections on topics such as acceptance, courage and creativity; this makes it easy for readers to navigate without being overwhelmed by a sea of advice. Topf’s voice and personality come through clearly, particularly in her well-told anecdotes about her relationship with her longtime husband, Michael. These stories are effectively balanced by and mixed in with more practical advice, particularly in the self-assessment lists and quizzes at the end. There are times when the exhortations toward positive thinking start to feel a bit repetitive; after all, there are only so many different ways in which the author can say, “Move into that loving place where you can expand past any limitations and live in the freedom that is always within you.” Yet on the whole, the advice remains resonant, and the author has much to teach her readers. Her clear, accessible prose style makes her an important voice in her field, and her life is an inspiration in itself.
A self-help guide that’s full of practical tips and meaningful nuggets of positive wisdom.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491748046
Page Count: 198
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2014
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
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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