A successful and readable wellness and self-improvement manual.
A debut guide to health and happiness prescribes thought systems and practices to improve readers’ quality of life.
El Zein knows a lot about the journey to fulfillment. Drawing from her experiences of silent retreats, meditation, reading, learning events, and online research, she delivers a conversational and helpful strategy for removing some of life’s major obstacles to fulfillment. Discussing empathy, human connection, and the inner self, the author pushes readers to challenge negative beliefs and adopt positive practices that will enrich personal relationships and themselves. Commitment to healthy habits is emphasized as one of the most important ways to tackle anxiety. Pain and worry, El Zein explains, are often more comfortable to deal with than the change and work required to alleviate them permanently by digging deep into the soul for the foundation of the torments creating stress. The author references other thinkers and motivators, like Tony Robbins, and posits important principles, such as keeping the self in its “peak state” to achieve the best results. Commitment and fortification of goals are two mantras that ripple throughout the manual. In the later parts of the book, El Zein writes about confronting fear. She uses many famous figures as examples of people who overcame impairments and self-doubts in order to achieve their goals. From Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) to Tom Cruise, the author employs anecdotes about well-known celebrities to show that sometimes setbacks can become springboards to success. El Zein ends with healthy nutrition tips and thoughts about hydration, exercise, and body image. Cleverly describing her cerebral program as a “mental diet,” the author handles thought processes and beliefs in the same way that she deals with beneficial foods. By feeding themselves constructive, affirming thoughts rather than criticisms and qualms, readers will alter their present states, according to the author. Overall, the book is lucid, full of effective ideas, and refreshing in its approach to positive steps toward self-reinforcement and change.
A successful and readable wellness and self-improvement manual.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-9-94839-700-7
Page Count: 251
Publisher: Be You International
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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