A richly thoughtful and offbeat self-help guide.
A broad-based, comprehensive approach to finding one’s purpose in life.
Figuring out the meaning of one’s life, writes consultant Novosel in his nonfiction debut, can feel too challenging to contemplate. To counter this type of thinking, he stresses that the insight necessary to begin a self-realization journey need not happen in a single, melodramatic flash—it can be a slow, gradual process. His book presents principles and some activities that aim to help make this process more concrete. Several chapters concentrate on big ideas, from “Emotions” to “Ethics” to “Belief,” and in all cases, Novosel reminds readers of their own agency: “You control your own destiny,” he writes. “Choice is a crucial component of finding your meaning in life because you ultimately decide what is meaningful to you.” In clear but substantial prose, he seeks to help his readers clarify what’s meaningful to them—and what isn’t and can’t possibly be. It’s not surprising, he writes, that people often use various crutches to manipulate these priorities, but he offers a warning: “Alcohol, tobacco, opioids, non-reproductive sexual activity, gambling, and other addictive substances and behaviors affect their emotions and trigger their brains’ rewards systems in ways that are not conducive to growth.” Novosel provides his readers with various “thought exercises” and writing assignments, and his tone throughout the book is one of reassurance as he tells readers of what they can achieve if they take stock of their emotions and self-destructive habits. His approach is also thoroughly secular and science-aware: “The result of human evolution,” Novosel writes, “is an unprecedented combination of genetics, instinct, and rational thoughts.” It’s an uncanny combination of elements that results in an unexpectedly uplifting book.
A richly thoughtful and offbeat self-help guide.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948220-00-2
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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