Chopra is the main character in her own minimelodrama.
A lightweight self-help book about living the life you want.
“Intents,” writes Chopra, daughter of Deepak, are expressions of who we aspire to be…[and] are a way of defining what we want and asking the universe or God for help.” Her book, written mainly in the present tense, focuses on her own recent period of resolve to live “with intent.” Finding an acronym in the word “intent,” Chopra divides her work into six sections: Incubate, Notice, Trust, Express, Nurture and Take Action. She presents herself as a stereotypically harried, suburban soccer mom, prone to guilt, stress and self-image issues. The story she shares is her own attempt to redefine her priorities, and she herself becomes one of those priorities. Indeed, the author is the center of this book, and her presence often overshadows the advice given. Chopra takes readers on a wide-ranging tour of intent-related concepts, beginning with meditation, a practice which, in many ways, is foundational to intentional living. She also discusses the importance of putting intents into words, expressing them and sharing them with others. She espouses the practice of nurture, but it’s less the nurturing of others than the nurturing of self. Indeed, though Chopra pays lip service to asking, “How can I serve?” she comes off as self-absorbed. In one instance, a family friend is diagnosed with cancer. The author’s common reaction is, “If this happened to one of us, how would we handle it?” On a trip to India to visit aging relatives, she wallowed in their fawning nurture. Upon arriving home, she was overwhelmed with stress by her first conversation with her family: “Later, while lying in bed, I try to figure out why I felt so instantly tense, and I realize their stories triggered that all-too familiar toxic cocktail of guilt and worry.”
Chopra is the main character in her own minimelodrama.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3985-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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