An earnest self-help book that affirms the benefits of positive thinking yet barely explores the science behind the concept.
An anecdotal account details how the transformative power of language can make someone a virtual “superhero.”
This book is all about words, how they can either limit readers or set them free: “Words are the power within you.” The theme is that language is a potent tool that affects how individuals think and learn; the words they say to themselves and hear from others can change their lives if they let them. The text follows the author’s lifelong awakening to this concept, likening that stirring to a birth. The structure is loosely autobiographical, with ideas and arguments interwoven with Nold’s (Ten Steps to Effective Recognition, 2004) childhood experiences, her feelings of victimization, and her eventual metamorphosis and healing. Scientific principles are mentioned, with fields like neuroplasticity and epigenetics discussed briefly to explain how the brain adapts neural pathways based on thoughts and language, the different ways people process information, and how positive thoughts can even cure disease. In this volume, Nold mines her own experiences to make her points, basing her conclusions on insights gleaned from a bout with cancer, epiphanies from therapy, and reflections on certain life choices she’s made, such as caring for others at the expense of realizing her dreams. Part advice manual, part memoir, this work is highly personal, and the research cited is selective, somewhat eclectic, and necessarily scanty given the book’s brevity. It reads much like a carefully annotated letter to a friend, with a warm tone that underscores the author’s eagerness to share the lessons she’s learned: “My life has taught me that I have the power to craft my life how I want, to fulfill my hopes and dreams once I realized the key.” A quick read, this volume should prove useful to those who are trying to correct negative self-pronouncements and break self-defeating patterns in their lives. But parts of it may be too personal to be widely relatable.
An earnest self-help book that affirms the benefits of positive thinking yet barely explores the science behind the concept.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5043-6955-8
Page Count: 84
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2017
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
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
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