The Bennetts administer a highly informative and entertaining smack down to get your head on straight.
Psychiatrist Michael Bennett and his comedy-writer daughter, Sarah, combine to demonstrate “why self-improvement is hard and sometimes impossible, even when we’re strong-willed and well guided.”
First, a word about the invectives here: they are legion. “Given life’s cruelty and unfairness,” the Bennetts believe that “profanity is a source of comfort, clarity, and strength.” They may be on to something, for the liberal sprinkling of profanities is not only pointed, but they ring loudly in your head so as not to ring loudly at those with whom you have issues, which rarely improves matters. The authors show us how to stop reaching for the moon, to read the situation, keep cool, and effect what you can. “Sometimes we are simply life’s bitch,” they write, and it’s important to maintain your sense of humor, bend your wishes to the feasible, and tuck away your feelings and bad behaviors. Out of many possible ruinous delusions and adversaries, the Bennetts focus on 10: self-improvement, self-esteem, fairness, helpfulness, serenity, love, communication, parenthood, assholes, and treatment. Regarding love: “In actuality, love and hate aren’t that dissimilar; both evoke the kind of passionate, heated, needy feelings that create more problems than they solve.” You will always be a slave to these qualities and situations as long as you fail to understand your limits and live with them. It’s vital, write the authors, to get informed, pay attention, and refuse to resort to subterfuge. Throughout the book, the Bennetts tender positive suggestions to manage all the “shit” of life via established methods for making the best of things. They provide scenarios aplenty, charts to map helpful behavior, a solid measure of humor, and abundant graciousness, acting as Sherpas through the crevasse fields of life.
The Bennetts administer a highly informative and entertaining smack down to get your head on straight.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8999-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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
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