A valuable source of facts and guidance on avoiding a frightening crime.
In this comprehensive self-help guide, Proctor (How to Stop a Stalker, 2003) offers tips on how to avoid being a victim of stalking.
The author, a retired California police detective who now lectures and consults with law-enforcement agencies, aims to present practical information about stalking and how to avoid it. He discusses various states’ and countries’ stalking laws as well as 19 different “stalking behaviors” to watch out for. He draws on his investigative background to illustrate his points with specific case histories and categorizes various kinds of stalkers, including the stranger stalker, in which “the victim/target is hounded by an unknown entity.” However, the most useful and absorbing part of the book may be the chapter called “A Stalker’s Bag of Tricks,” which discusses such ploys as identity theft and cyberstalking, and how potential victims can prevent them. Some stalkers, for example, employ pharming, or creating a bogus website to steal visitors’ credit card numbers. Some security recommendations will likely be familiar to readers, such as choosing a new, hard-to-guess PIN. Others may be surprising; for example, the author writes that he avoids using “social networks,” as its users generally reveal too much personal information to the general public. Proctor also offers an entire chapter of advice for people who are currently being stalked, urging them to keep complete records of everything that might be relevant to the crime and to install high-quality home lighting, locks and doors. The longest section of the book deals with how police can better fight stalkers, but it may the least useful for many readers. Proctor provides a precise table of contents and an index so that readers can quickly locate relevant material.
A valuable source of facts and guidance on avoiding a frightening crime.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1477453131
Page Count: 512
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2013
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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