A successful, enriching work about anxiety, mindfulness, and positive perspective.
This debut work of self-improvement uses imagination and illustrative thinking to help readers “transform” their anxiety into confidence.
Segurado, a medical doctor, offers a lively, colorfully illustrated guide to meditations that serve to reimagine stress and anxiety, rather than just calm it, which sets it apart from similar meditation and self-help titles. Rather than delving deeply into the psyche, the author suggests “mindful framing,” which he asserts could transform one’s life while only taking up 15 minutes of one’s morning. Reframing stressful and anxious thoughts into calm, positive visions is the key to “a balanced and healthy life,” he says. He provides full-color illustrations to help with visualizations, and his website provides videos and audio to supplement the book’s material, with the goal of “training” the reader to become a master at positive meditation. Specifically, Segurado suggests that readers learn to use their imagination, or “mind’s eye,” in order to figure out what’s causing frustrations and what needs to be done to overcome them. Then he offers a visualization in which the reader imagines boarding an “anxiety bus,” in which all the passengers represent sources of anxiety. Knowing these sources, the author explains, helps a person understand and deflate his or her difficulties. At the end of the visualization, the reader steps off the bus and watches it drive away—symbolizing that stresses are external and don’t have to rule one’s mind. This and other tools, which help one engage the five senses and develop various rituals, may make this book a useful resource for people who struggle with anxious thinking. Overall, it’s an engaging and creative unique approach to meditation and wellness that could be taught to children and adults alike.
A successful, enriching work about anxiety, mindfulness, and positive perspective.Pub Date: March 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-05098-9
Page Count: 86
Publisher: NEO Chi Institute
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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