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
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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