A warm and wise overview of how to navigate the pressures of an anxious era.
Psychology and education instructor Hanley-Dafoe presents a multipart approach to achieving wellness in the modern world.
As Hanley-Dafoe points out at the beginning of her new book, the pace of life is only getting faster, and the demands of life continuously increase—and at a far more rapid rate than human beings can tolerate. The self-help industry, she says, is based on the notion that “We are failing at our own lives.” “The divides around ideas, beliefs, values, and actions have become expansive,” she notes. “We are weary, wobbly, and discouraged.” In this book, she grounds her advice with frank openness about her personal struggles, including mental health issues, learning disabilities, and grief, and she breaks down her insights under several broad headings and focuses on fostering a sense of wellness in one’s body, heart, and mind as well as in the wider world. Throughout, she urges readers to be compassionate to themselves and cognizant of their own limitations when it comes to curbing bad habits and creating new ones. “Self-management is challenging for so many of us because we often rely on willpower and motivation to manage our behaviours,” she writes, warning that “these two energies are fickle friends.” Hanley-Dafoe’s decision to base so much of her approach on her experience is a wise one, as it allows her to very effectively alternate between empathy and moments of tough love: “Our physical pursuits of health are often attempts to heal emotional parts of our lives,” she writes when discussing physical self-care. “Our bodies are our protectors, not the enemy.” But she’s equally quick to warn her readers that “we cannot hustle our way out of discomfort,” and one can’t outthink their way out of every difficulty. This combination of clarity and compassion will make her suggestions invaluable to overstressed readers.
A warm and wise overview of how to navigate the pressures of an anxious era.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781774582626
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Page Two
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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IN THE NEWS
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