Earnest advice on finding true love.
Fried, in her first self-help book, promotes self-love before seeking romance, with plenty of mental exercises, self-affirmations and personal anecdotes along the way.
Fried places great emphasis on her personal journey in finding a soul mate, and this book seems to serve as a kind of catharsis after years of heartbreak and rejection. A strong personality shines through her writing; each page is doused with exclamation marks and sprinkled with sentences in all caps pleading with readers to seek out the best of life: “THE VERY FIRST RELATIONSHIP THAT OFTEN NEEDS TO BE FIXED IS THE ONE YOU HAVE WITH YOU!” This approach gives her book a somewhat unpolished feel that still comes off as endearing, even maternal. In the start of her work, Fried speaks of her influences, from Pavlovian and cognitive behavioral psychology to other self-help authors. She tells readers, “[R]emember that some of what you read will apply to you, and some will not. Use what works for you.” Each chapter features a “visualization” and an “affirmation” focusing on the chapter’s theme. Her main focus is on the benefits of these affirmations and visualizations in achieving the life you desire—namely, finding the partner of your dreams. For the comfort segment, she suggests readers mentally remain in their ideal places of comfort for 15 minutes; somewhat confusingly, however, she doesn’t give a suggested time for the remainder of the visualizations. As the work continues, more inconsistencies appear, and the book becomes a bit too personal. Much of her advice flip-flops between making yourself more—or less—available in order to find a nurturing spouse. Better structuring would have been helpful, but the care and empathy Fried delivers will nonetheless leave her readers with a more positive outlook on love and life.
Earnest advice on finding true love.Pub Date: March 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1492971290
Page Count: 122
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2014
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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