A collection of healthy reminders about taking change and adversity in stride.
Zenker presents an outline for a new way of facing life’s uncertainties.
In her new book, the author, a business strategy coach, introduces the Reset Mindset, a perspective shift that “predisposes you to approach a challenge with fresh eyes, to be open to whatever perspective-taking reveals”; Zenker adds that “simply taking a Reset Moment guarantees you have a margin of safety built in.” According to the author, the Reset Mindset has been the driver of her success and personal fulfillment, and in these pages she describes how it can work for her readers as well. She presents a number of “Mental Models” for approaching the “messy, complex, and uncertain” nature of life. The “velocity” model, for instance, “helps you understand that speed and direction both matter”; the “reciprocity” model stresses the value of positivity, and the “margin of safety” model “helps you understand that things don’t always go as planned.” In Zenker’s conception, the Reset Mindset is the toolbox in which readers can store these various Mental Models—all of which can be used to turn uncertainty into unexpected opportunity. (Reset practices, per the author, can also help people to detach from adverse situations personally in order to make better decisions during emotionally charged moments.) Zenker often resorts to banal observations (do readers in 2024 need to be told the world can be uncertain?), but her book is well-designed, her prose is appealingly personal, and she pulls together and engagingly describes many familiar motivational concepts, like Hanlon’s Razor (“never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity”) or the 80/20 rule of the Pareto Principle. The author consistently brings matters down to the essentials, cautioning her readers not to get so caught up in chasing rabbits that they forget that the chase isn’t the point—catching the rabbits is the point.
A collection of healthy reminders about taking change and adversity in stride.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798891382299
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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