A versatile guide for those seeking personal transformation.
Life coach and speaker Haber offers a self-help book that aims to help readers pinpoint their life’s purpose and achieve their goals.
The author gears this book toward those who are “unconsciously and unwittingly doing what harms them and, by extension, others.” Her working theory is that people must choose a positive mindset to put more positivity into the world. The book is designed to instill self-acceptance in readers so that they can not only move toward what they want in life, but also make a difference in the lives of their peers. It’s split into three sections (“Being Enough,” “Doing Enough,” and “Having Enough”) that move through the phases of mindfulness and self-love, life purpose, and personal goals as well as the attitudes that improve overall happiness. Haber goes into detail about practices that improve self-esteem and self-communication, such as recognizing one’s inner child, extending forgiveness to others, taking responsibility, setting intentions, and many other actions. By offering clear steps and examples from her own life, Haber offers a succinct guide that may help those who may be stuck in negative self-talk cycles. There are straightforward solutions, such as remembering to eat healthily, and then there are tougher lessons: “You have to be happy to become happy. You have to be it for no particular reason and for all reasons. Being is the only state you can build on.” Haber is a smart, competent writer who distills life lessons into digestible chapters, resulting in a self-help book that delivers what it sets out to do. Although the book’s implementation of science is loose, with few cited studies, it does help to give its suggestions context for those who may be wary about a purely spiritual self-improvement approach. In addition, Haber is consistently supportive and detailed in her proposals. Overall, this is a refreshingly robust self-help manual that many readers will likely find useful.
A versatile guide for those seeking personal transformation.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 979-8986501109
Page Count: 342
Publisher: DreamWorks Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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