One man’s progress toward achieving peace of mind.
Humphries’ debut is partly an inspirational tract and partly a love letter to his family, though he welcomes all to the table.
“This book is about my life and I ask you to dance with me looking at my experiences and lessons learned,” Humphries says in this disarmingly upbeat story. On the surface, contrary to the title, it hasn’t all been good in his life. His father committed suicide (he’d been undone after being paralyzed by a bullet in the back when his illegal still was raided), his mother suffered dementia, cancer ran a ragged path through his family and he often had to scramble to make ends meet. But the author is a silver-lining kind of guy, as well as open-minded, bighearted and inclusive—“We need to respect everyone for who and what they are. You should never get to the point of believing you are right and everyone else is wrong.” He provides an intimate portrait of his footloose life in the American South in the 1960s and 1970s—singing gospel, hopping from job to job, selling insurance or faux finishes or cars, flipping fixer-uppers, working as a roofer and shuffling from Florida to Texas to Oklahoma. Humphries’ bubbling enthusiasm results in some scattershot pages, and his story jumps between autobiography and inspirational tome. Elsewhere, his words of encouragement occasionally feel flimsy and incomplete—“Make sure everyday you are performing to your optimal potential!... Miracles will happen.” But the author’s positive attitude shines. Humphries doesn’t despair, even when he is down to his last bologna sandwich, because he has persistence, gumption and lots of friends and family, all of whom the author warmly references in these pages. Ultimately, Humphries’ message is undeniable and salubrious—don’t grouse and grumble, but give thanks and face life with a smile.
One man’s progress toward achieving peace of mind.Pub Date: April 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-1460953860
Page Count: 160
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2011
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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