A man shares the stories of his life to inspire and help others.
Following up Growing Tall Amidst Obstacles (2014), his debut, Chief Ekenna continues to reflect on moments from his childhood in Nigeria and subsequent career as an attorney in Los Angeles. As with his first book, the influence of Chinua Achebe can be felt in nearly every passage, and Ekenna recognizes him as the source of this book’s title and guiding principle. “If an unseasoned, and weak, and unaccomplished, and unsung, person like me steps up to Achebe’s challenge, and tell[s] my story, that will do a bit ‘more’ in encouraging others,” Ekenna writes. He weaves stories from his life with emails, quotes from other authors and even the lyrics to TV commercial jingles—finding them all equally inspirational and worthy of philosophical discussion. He begins with the death of a dear friend; in facing the senselessness of the situation, he finds all the more reason for everyone to share their stories, great and small, while they have the chance. “If you find the courage to change the way you look at things, the things you look at will find the courage to change,” he writes. Despite his intriguing immigrant background, Ekenna mostly chooses to look at small, specific moments from his life—a banal conversation with a woman on a plane, a car accident on the local news, the memory of a felled tree blocking a road, etc. Each moment is dissected at length and used to derive the life-affirming adages he shares with the world: e.g., “Change is possible. Anything is possible.” Some of these observational stories are engaging—particularly a humorous linguistic mix-up central to his first legal case in Nigeria—but many of them lose their potential impacts by being weighed down by tangents and diversions to other writings. Ekenna intends to show that there is value in every story—a striking point, but not all these stories live up to his ideals.
A collection of stories and philosophical musings that struggles to find a decent balance between narrative and introspection.Pub Date: July 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-1490711072
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: SELF-HELP
Did you like this book?
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. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
Categories: PSYCHOLOGY | SELF-HELP
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 31, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Categories: PSYCHOLOGY | SELF-HELP
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2022 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
