The more who read Barasch, the better the world will be. Inspiring and encouraging. (bibliography, endnotes)
What we know about kindness: a wide-ranging travelogue from a Western Buddhist’s journeys among the caring ones.
Why would a perfectly sane person reach out and help another when there’s nothing in it for him or herself? Barasch (Healing Dreams, 2000, etc.) delves into the question of compassion and comes up with building blocks and some plans for an architecture, not to mention tips for embarking on our own voyages of the heart. He starts by making the case that compassion is not only natural but good for you: “It is not tooth-and-nail competition but conciliation, cuddling, and cooperation that may be the central organizing principle of human evolution.” From here, he paints a portrait of kindness with a broad palate of sources ranging from the Sufi mystics to the bonobo monkeys. These do feel rather like field notes, sourced and annotated, as Barasch refers to research hormones involved in mother-infant relations, anthropological studies of tribalism, and psychological reports on nearly everything from TV’s effect on children to the willingness of passersby to help strangers. Yet the book consists chiefly of insightful depictions of actual experiences and experiments. Barasch panhandles and sleeps on the streets with the homeless, communicates in sign language with chimpanzees, sits in on an Israeli-Palestinian encounter group for youths, and speaks with people who have donated kidneys to complete strangers. More emcee than preacher, he introduces another wise person every third page to make his case, from the obscure (“sixteenth-century Tibetan meditation master Wangchuk Dorje”) to the celebrated (“I’ve been an Audrey Hepburn fan since I was a boy”). Almost the opposite of didactic, Barasch has a gentle touch. Even his prose is comforting, and his arguments are sometimes so subtly made that readers may not realize there even was an argument in the first place.
The more who read Barasch, the better the world will be. Inspiring and encouraging. (bibliography, endnotes)Pub Date: March 28, 2005
ISBN: 1-57954-711-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Rodale
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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
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
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