A psychology-driven text offers advice for how to avoid pitfalls in fitness programs.
From the start, this book highlights how it’s different from overly positive and excessively enthusiastic fitness manuals by leading with a powerful introduction: “I am you….I am someone who found themselves on a roller-coaster of getting fit, getting fat, dieting, binge eating to celebrate the successful diet, going to the gym a month before summer and on the second of January.” The book’s basic concept—that the average person will set and achieve fitness goals but probably won’t enjoy getting fit—isn’t a revolutionary one. However, debut author Soukkary conveys it in clear prose with a common-sense tone, and many readers will likely find it to be a valuable wake-up call. The book addresses how one creates habits and sets goals, and then identifies the mental blocks that hold one back from fitness and health success; the latter include problems with delayed gratification and a tendency to move goal posts regarding success. The author then outlines a versatile plan that encourages readers to set a goal, make it “SMART” (“Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely”), and “sidestep” mental obstacles on the path to achieving it. Simple examples along the way showcase helpful strategies. For example, the author outlines an “Exception” chart that shows when one can justifiably skip a workout, based on various circumstances; this avoids letting one’s “tired” brain make the choice, as it will usually choose not to work out. Overall, this text does a remarkable job of acknowledging failures while also noting that a commitment to fitness can be difficult to maintain. Readers who’ve halfheartedly pursued health or fitness regimens in the past will be renewed by this book’s reminders without feeling judged.
Down-to-earth, hopeful, and inventive health and fitness advice. (author bio)Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72833-341-0
Page Count: 100
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: HEALTH & FITNESS | PSYCHOLOGY
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Building on his lysergically drenched book How to Change Your Mind (2018), Pollan looks at three plant-based drugs and the mental effects they can produce.
The disastrous war on drugs began under Nixon to control two classes of perceived enemies: anti-war protestors and Black citizens. That cynical effort, writes the author, drives home the point that “societies condone the mind-changing drugs that help uphold society’s rule and ban the ones that are seen to undermine it.” One such drug is opium, for which Pollan daringly offers a recipe for home gardeners to make a tea laced with the stuff, producing “a radical and by no means unpleasant sense of passivity.” You can’t overthrow a government when so chilled out, and the real crisis is the manufacture of synthetic opioids, which the author roundly condemns. Pollan delivers a compelling backstory: This section dates to 1997, but he had to leave portions out of the original publication to keep the Drug Enforcement Administration from his door. Caffeine is legal, but it has stronger effects than opium, as the author learned when he tried to quit: “I came to see how integral caffeine is to the daily work of knitting ourselves back together after the fraying of consciousness during sleep.” Still, back in the day, the introduction of caffeine to the marketplace tempered the massive amounts of alcohol people were drinking even though a cup of coffee at noon will keep banging on your brain at midnight. As for the cactus species that “is busy transforming sunlight into mescaline right in my front yard”? Anyone can grow it, it seems, but not everyone will enjoy effects that, in one Pollan experiment, “felt like a kind of madness.” To his credit, the author also wrestles with issues of cultural appropriation, since in some places it’s now easier for a suburbanite to grow San Pedro cacti than for a Native American to use it ceremonially.
A lucid (in the sky with diamonds) look at the hows, whys, and occasional demerits of altering one’s mind.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-29690-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
Categories: BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | PSYCHOLOGY | NATURE | BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | HEALTH & FITNESS
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SEEN & HEARD
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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