A compact call to action for the improvement-minded.
Kinard offers advice for jump-starting your life in this slim motivational volume.
Life coach, speaker, and mentor Kinard’s stated goal is to inspire readers to extricate themselves from a RUT (“really unproductive time and place”) and live “ignited” lives. As Kinard explains, “A life ignited is ‘a life of purpose, on purpose, in motion.’ ” Through attestations, personal stories, and motivational facts (example: Walt Disney was once fired from a newspaper for being insufficiently creative), Kinard attempts to help readers get their lives back on track. Advice includes analyzing causes of failure, becoming open and committed to positive change, jettisoning bad habits and relationships, and remembering to love oneself. Throughout, Kinard shares experiences from her own life, including standing up to a fifth-grade bully, embracing technological advances early during her career in real estate, adopting a new diet at the suggestion of a doctor, and overcoming her fear to ask for a raise. In addition to her advice, Kinard encourages the reader to take an active role in the reading experience by physically writing the answers to many of the questions she poses, including (here she borrows some The Wizard of Oz metaphors) “What is your Emerald City (your goal/desired outcome)?” and “Who is the wicked witch in your life who is trying to keep you away from your goals and dreams?” While some of the instructions for self-interrogation seem simple or childish, the approach can, on occasion, reveal dimensions to personal problems that were previously obscure. Kinard frequently professes her belief in God (a lengthy recommended prayer of her own composition is included in the final chapter), and secular readers may be turned off. While Kinard retreads many of the established mantras of self-help culture, the simplicity and brevity of the volume recommend it over lengthier works.
A compact call to action for the improvement-minded.Pub Date: July 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5049-2015-5
Page Count: 86
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
