An engaging warning against a hopeless search for the fountain of youth that overlooks some of the painful issues of...
Mental health counselor and self-help guru Gurian (The Invisible Presence: How a Man's Relationship with His Mother Affects All His Relationships with Women, 2012, etc.) moves up the age spectrum to discuss how to embrace the experience of getting older.
Taking 50 as his starting point, the author divides the process into three stages. The years from 50 to 65 he calls the age of transformation—the proper time to begin preparing to become an elder. Gurian advocates the process of beginning to kick back at 50. Having reached a pinnacle of success, our minds and bodies are beginning to slow down. The arduous phase of child-rearing is coming to an end, allowing parents the opportunity to reconnect and opening the possibility of developing a second career or creative hobby. The next phase is from 65 through the 70s, a time for senior citizens to celebrate their accomplishments and re-examine their spiritual values. The last phase he calls “the age of spiritual completion,” a time for renouncing material values and looking toward the “wonder of dying and death.” Gurian offers concrete examples of ways to deal with problems of aging, such as loss of sexual prowess, and he suggests that a slow death can be preferable in that it allows us to “experience dying fully.” Still, he admits that “dying and death can be terrible and upsetting.” He questions the desirability of such procedures as knee replacements for those over the age of 80 and supports the right of individuals to assistance in terminating their lives.
An engaging warning against a hopeless search for the fountain of youth that overlooks some of the painful issues of retirement, such as loss of savings, debt and adult children needing financial and emotional support.Pub Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0669-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
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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