A somewhat uneven self-help work but one that may be helpful for environmentally sensitive people.
Debut author and life coach Reese recounts her own experiences as an empath and suggests resources to help people in similar situations achieve strength and balance.
In this guide, she defines an empath as a person who is extremely sensitive to the world around them to the degree that they become easily overwhelmed by external stimuli. People with empathic natures, she notes, may prefer to stay at home and avoid office work. Empaths can also have difficulties in romantic relationships, be prone to information overload, and even be affected by energy emanating from electronics, she asserts. Reese describes aspects of her own life as an empath, which she says included dealing with headaches and anxiety. Biofeedback therapy, she says, helped her learn how to breathe in a meditative way, relax, and sleep. Interestingly, she also notes that, due to her empathic nature, she and her husband tried sleeping in separate bedrooms, which she found worked well for her marriage as a whole. Reese’s personal stories are often engaging, and her decision to include them in this guidebook gives more context to its self-help aspects; the elixir of the title refers to these self-care strategies in aggregate. Some recommendations seem basic and obvious, such as eating healthy food and spending time in nature. The book also offers more specific advice that may be less familiar to many readers, such as taking gamma-aminobutyric acid supplements or using red-light therapy; however, it provides few citations of scientific studies to back up its claims. At times, the work can be repetitive, and readers may find some of its language to be a bit harsh, as in a chapter in which she advises the reader to “give a damn about yourself.” The work might have been stronger if she had included the stories of other empaths; it also doesn’t address appropriate careers for empaths, which could also have been a fruitful area of exploration.
A somewhat uneven self-help work but one that may be helpful for environmentally sensitive people.Pub Date: April 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982265-31-1
Page Count: 218
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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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