Honest, teen-friendly advice from trusted sources.
America’s favorite doctors Roizen and Oz (You: Having a Baby, 2010, etc.) answer teens’ health and life questions with friendly, nonjudgmental guidance.
Roizen, founder of RealAge.com, and Oz, Emmy Award winning host of The Dr. Oz Show, offer straightforward information on numerous topics important to teens. The good doctors weigh in on simple skin care, PMS and stress management, as well as weightier issues such as depression, addiction, STIs, the science of sex and how to effectively and safely use birth control. The authors encourage good decision making through basic biological facts—pierced tongues are bad for teeth, tattoos should be applied hygienically, etc.—but the voice does not nag, and autonomy of choice is respected. While teens may not know that accidents are the major cause of death and serious injury for their age group, they can learn to avoid risky behavior with exercises like delayed gratification, which trains the adolescent brain to become more logical. The biggest worries teens may have are whether they are normal and liked (or loved), yet they’ll likely be relieved to find answers to many embarrassing questions such as, “Why are my breasts uneven?” and “Is there anything I can do to increase my penis size?” The book’s tone is humorous in many places—e.g., there are some things that can’t be controlled, like the fact that “dad insists on wearing black socks with sneakers to mow the lawn.” Easy fitness advice and “25 Top Tips for Teens” are also included.
Honest, teen-friendly advice from trusted sources.Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9258-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
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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