A practical book that aims to help readers create a better life through better relationships.
A guide to communication in everyday life.
In this book, Hirst asserts that it’s the quality of one’s interactions that makes or breaks one’s happiness. “Don’t relinquish your opportunity for a happy life and meaningful relationships because of beliefs that do not serve you,” she writes. “If you wait for a ‘perfect world,’ you will be waiting a long time!” She supports this advice with plenty of practical ideas throughout the book, including thought experiments on what interactions are possible and fruitful, a discussion of one’s role in every conversation, and others. She provides exercises, as well, including one that asks readers to consider their top five values or characteristics and how they can nurture them to create the lives they want. By focusing on communication, Hirst gives readers a set of basics to start practicing immediately, and a checklist to prepare for particularly important conversations. Hirst not only asks readers to consider how to communicate, but also when and why, and gives recommendations on how to divide one’s attention between different groups of people, such as family, friends, partners, children, colleagues, and the wider community. She also provides insights into how to manage one’s emotions and conflicts, using clear examples throughout. This book is ideal for anyone doing self-improvement work or who feels that his or her communication style could be better. It’s also an excellent introduction to important concepts, such as the difference between assertiveness and aggression, and the ever-shifting etiquette of text-based, real-time communications. Some readers may not like the work’s slow, methodical pace, or the pauses that Hirst takes in order to share her own stories and those of others. Overall, however, the book is a solid guide to effective communication.
A practical book that aims to help readers create a better life through better relationships.Pub Date: April 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4602-5622-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2015
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
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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