Easy-reading thoughts to ponder in an eye-catching design.
In her energetic self-help debut, Conger offers familiar ideas for personal improvement and success.
Like many others on the shelf, this perkier-than-thou book believes in the power of positive thinking. Splashed with bold color designs and action photographs of people—like a woman with outstretched arms in a field of bright yellow flowers—Conger’s exuberant pep talk feels like a warm and fuzzy motivational poster. Many of the colorful pictures include inspirational quotes, such as these attributed to Estée Lauder: “I never dreamed about success. I worked for it.” Indeed, hard work and grit are the cornerstones of Conger’s message, one often tinged with humor. A photo of a pretty young woman asleep in bed is accompanied by the message, “GET THE F*@% OUT OF BED.” Conger also jokingly compares the Broadway musical Annie to her own “hard knock life.” When Conger was 3, her mother died, and she had a turbulent adolescence. But she didn’t let hardship stop her from reaching her goals. This slim, easy-to-flip volume offers familiar concepts for self-improvement, such as becoming a more loving person (the author suggests smiling at cashiers) and learning gratitude. Conger’s upbeat kaleidoscope of advice isn’t a step-by-step guide, but it does have some usable ideas. For example, to cultivate a grateful heart, Conger suggests sending 10 thank-you cards to people and keeping a “gratitude journal.” Likewise, she recommends Dr. B.J. Fogg’s “Tiny Habits” (and reading for four minutes a day) to foster positive life habits. The author’s voice is friendly, and she sometimes addresses readers directly when making a point: e.g., “Are you ready for it?” She also offers book recommendations, like Smile and Move by Sam Parker, and thought-provoking items, such as the “How Not To Be Thankful” poster by Mark Russell available on her website. Readers looking for in-depth discussion might not be sated, but those without a lot of reading time can find inspiration in Conger’s quick, cheerful words.
Easy-reading thoughts to ponder in an eye-catching design.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-937498-78-8
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Elevate
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2015
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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