A worthwhile book for readers looking for alternative ways to help those struggling with addiction.
Documentary filmmaker Palmer, with addiction therapist Pond, presents a practical guide for helping loved ones drink less, informed by scientific research and firsthand experience.
Most addicts are familiar with 12-step programs, which offer a set of actions and principles meant to pave the way to recovery. For example, Alcoholics Anonymous encourages members to list people who’ve been negatively affected by their drinking and to seek amends. Meanwhile, the loved ones of addicts, in their own support groups, are often told to “withdraw with love” to counteract what’s often described as “codependent” or “enabling” behavior—two words that Palmer condemns as “blithely tossed about” in the world of addiction and recovery. She outlines what she characterizes as a tender approach, using 20 “practical, science-backed strategies that operationalize kindness, compassion, and empathy to help your loved one drink less.” Palmer wrote the book with her partner, Pond, an addiction therapist whose personal struggle with conventional recovery programs inspired this alternative approach. For instance, instead of working toward a goal of flat-out quitting, Palmer explores the benefits of harm reduction; instead of encouraging withdrawing with love, she makes a case for establishing firm boundaries, which, she says, allows addicts to take responsibility for their recovery. Supported by research from institutions such as Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, this plainspoken self-help guide offers a balance of personal and clinical reflection: “I can’t possibly teach you things that good therapists take years to learn,” Palmer writes, “but I can tell you about simple tools and techniques that can make your interactions with your loved one much less combative and much more effective.” Indeed, although the authors would agree that no one set of guidelines suits everyone, this book’s ethos may inspire readers to seek out more personalized methods of support.
A worthwhile book for readers looking for alternative ways to help those struggling with addiction.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781774584668
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Page Two
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2024
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
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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