An intriguing and useful, if not entirely original, self-improvement system.
A business executive focuses on personal development in this debut guide.
An epiphany about his own direction in life led Thurgood to create “REACH,” which he describes as “an intentional, purpose-driven personal growth and development framework.” The author’s concept includes “Five Focus Areas”: “Relationships, Career & Finances, Health & Fitness, Intellectual & Spiritual, and Service.” Curiously, Thurgood chose to devote a single chapter to an overview of these five areas and then append at the end of the book detailed descriptions of each one. Despite this somewhat odd organizational construct, the overview chapter clearly defines the areas in a concise text accompanied by helpful, bulleted sidebars. The descriptions at the end of the work do a very good job of elaborating on each area, providing proactive, if obvious, suggestions, such as “Connect with Your Colleagues” (Relationships), “Keep a Budget” (Career & Finances), and “Reduce Stress” (Health & Fitness). One intriguing technique Thurgood explains is “Bursting,” in which an individual aggressively pursues a major objective “that might have otherwise taken far longer or that you may have never achieved at all.” Another creative idea the author proposes is gamification. Thurgood suggests that making a game out of achieving goals and adding “rewards, punishments, and visual trackers” could prove to be motivational. Noting the importance of peer relationships, the author devotes two chapters to the formation and management of a “REACH group.” This aspect of the REACH framework is critical, in Thurgood’s view, so he shares a handy, eight-step process for selecting group partners and also discusses how best to manage the band. While some readers may find the idea of “weekly check-ins,” “monthly meetups,” “REACH Retreats,” and “one-on-one meetups” to be overly intense, the REACH group concept seems generally sensible and well thought out. The “Additional Materials” section after the final chapter is unusually comprehensive. Along with the descriptions of the five areas, the segment includes a valuable self-assessment, goal planning worksheet, quarterly report, group overview, and sample REACH Retreat agenda. All of these items enrich the book’s content.
An intriguing and useful, if not entirely original, self-improvement system.Pub Date: May 15, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9855039-1-3
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Ledgefork Media
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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