A helpful handbook for those who sometimes let their emotions rule.
A debut book repackages common self-improvement themes into a useful manual for reducing stress and achieving goals.
Psychologist D’Agostino believes emotions can get in the way of thinking. That’s why he employs the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy to help clients overcome problems through “naked thinking,” which he describes as “thinking with the suffocating cloak of emotions stripped away.” Dividing the book into two sections, the author first explores different aspects of naked thinking and then, through anecdotes, demonstrates how it can be applied to various situations. The material is not unique: topics such as managing emotions, decreasing stress, improving self-confidence, and setting goals are well-trodden in self-help volumes. Still, D’Agostino writes with a breezy, down-to-earth style that, while authoritative, feels informal and friendly. He also has a way of crystallizing ideas and conjuring up just the right definition for concepts that could be amorphous. He defines courage, for example, as “the ability to face any strong emotion that leads us in a different direction from our intended goal, and still do the right thing regardless of how we feel.” It is the second section of the book in which the concept of naked thinking comes to fruition. Here, D’Agostino deftly delivers numerous stories that appropriately make certain points, sometimes in dramatic fashion. Often, the moral of each tale is different than what one might expect. For example, a story about a man who unfailingly does the right thing, even though it costs him his job and marriage, seems to illustrate the fact that “virtue is its own reward”; in reality, the tale is meant to suggest that “anything, including pursuing a supposed virtue, can be destructive when it’s made to be the entire focus of a person’s life.” The outcome of each episode, coupled with the author’s keen observations and insights, creates vivid life lessons that should resonate with any reader. Another nice touch are the sidebar boxes that encourage the reader to write down thoughts related to the content, thus “personalizing” the work.
A helpful handbook for those who sometimes let their emotions rule.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5320-0598-5
Page Count: 236
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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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