Concise messages packed with meaning that can be readily applied using well-crafted self-assessment questions.
A debut self-help workbook focuses on balancing the mind, body, and soul.
The goal of Morgan Duzoglou and Robert Duzoglou in this manual is to offer readers greater clarity, direction, and control in their life odysseys. The first realm they cover is the mind, encouraging people to identify their positive and negative thought processes and analyze their effects. By becoming more aware of thoughts and values, readers can turn their minds into powerful tools as they journey through life. The second topic the authors discuss is the body. They emphasize the amazing things that the body is capable of doing and suggest ways to amplify its energy, such as meditating and recognizing the center of energy. Finally, they expound on the soul, helping readers identify “soul experiences,” unexplainable moments of connection with God and others. Embracing the idea that “what you measure you can manage,” the authors include several useful “checkpoints” throughout the book that provide deep self-assessment questions and space to record answers. For example, “Write down one predominant thought that repeats itself daily. Try to get to the root of this thought.” Most chapters also have a “Caution Bubble” of something to watch out for, like the warning to stay away from paths “fueled by selfish or egotistical needs.” The brevity of the authors’ insights makes their advice very easy to comprehend and remember, even when exploring abstract concepts like the soul. Creative wordplay also makes the lessons memorable, such as using the word “in-sight” to describe the discernment of thought processes because “your mind is quite literally in sight.” Most of the wordplay is natural and illuminating (for example, “in-sight” and “limit-less”), but some examples seem stretched beyond obvious interpretation (“come-pass” and “identi-fly”). The book is evenly balanced between reading material and writing opportunities, and the self-assessment questions are creative, enlightening, and highly beneficial. This guide is an excellent resource for getting to know yourself holistically through examining and improving the mind, body, and soul.
Concise messages packed with meaning that can be readily applied using well-crafted self-assessment questions.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5043-9909-8
Page Count: 108
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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