A successful, progressive daily handbook about awareness, creativity, gratitude, and fulfillment.
In this debut self-improvement guide, Nocero provides short, easily digestible wisdom about positive thinking and daily creative practices.
Using a calendar-style, one-entry-per-day format, this book aims to help readers find gratitude by offering small, human reminders regarding inspiration, play, creativity, and imagination. If you’re an average, busy adult, this helpful work may serve as a tool to spice up your life a bit, reconnect with friends or loved ones, or use an imagination that’s sometimes dulled by the monotony of routine. For example, in one entry, Nocero reminds readers to “Remember to play” and notes that while children “live in the world of their imaginations,” adults must choose to re-energize their spirits with imaginative thinking. Playfulness, she suggests, is a way to remember the wonder of life. In another entry, she urges readers to maintain healthy friendships—to “water” them as one would plants. Other entries offer more poignant wisdom regarding awareness: “We live in a world where there is…a pervading belief that there is not enough of anything to go around.” But in reality, she says, “Love is abundant. Kindness is abundant. Success is abundant.” These thoughtful moments are sure to enrich readers’ days, offering ideas to consider and share with others. Along with each calendar entry is a helpful “Magical Key to Bliss”—a short mantra about patience, listening, taking risks, or living freely, such as, “Sow love, and reap a life of abundance!” Overall, this book could be a great resource for family gatherings, a springboard for dinner-table discussions, or a gift for a friend to help him or her connect each day to a positive idea.
A successful, progressive daily handbook about awareness, creativity, gratitude, and fulfillment.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5061-8368-8
Page Count: 460
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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