A modular and uplifting plan for making and reaching goals.
A debut book offers a step-by-step guide to achieving a wide variety of objectives.
In this work, Jones delivers a short, simple breakdown of seven key steps to attaining success. These range from finding a “goal partner” to help sort out the choice of paths (“Life is just easier when you have someone who genuinely loves and supports you,” she points out) to utilizing an array of methods, from yoga to prayer to meditation, to connect with a personal higher power “so that you are clear on your life’s purpose and the goals you should strive for while you are here on earth.” Every step is described in quick detail and followed up with clarifying review questions and a list of “assignments” designed to help readers feel directly involved in focusing on what they really want and how they wish to achieve it (“The assignment for step three is to visualize yourself achieving your goals. If you are very familiar with visualization, please tackle this exercise with a fresh new outlook”). Jones keeps her advice as broad-based as possible, stressing the basics of passion over the specifics of any particular aspiration (“It can be anything you desire,” she writes, “but it has to be something”). The counsel in these pages remains unfailingly upbeat and encouraging; Jones addresses the conflicts and worries of her readers directly, including dealing with those who are unsure they have the time or ability to remap their lives according to the kinds of steps outlined here. “You have time for things you choose to have time for,” she insists. “You are in charge of your destiny.” This element of empowerment, for instance, underscores one of the work’s most substantial segments, on managing money and debt. But the idea runs throughout the accessible book, from deciding on a life trajectory to finding the right people and inspirations to execute it. Everything Jones advises is grounded in simple common sense, but that trait is helpfully and enthusiastically presented, with all the usual self-help flab cut out.
A modular and uplifting plan for making and reaching goals.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4917-0806-4
Page Count: 82
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
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
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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