A solid read for devout Christians, conservatives and self-help book aficionados; skeptics and atheists may find it hard to...
America is fast asleep and one man believes the key to winning the war for the soul of America lies in understanding hypnosis.
As a teenage boy in post-World War II England, Ruben Obermeister witnessed a carnival hypnotist at work and marveled at how the man made people do things out of their character. But rather than tricks, Obermeister thought that perhaps hypnosis could be used to help people better their lives instead. He moved to America in the early 1950s and became Roy Masters (The Adam and Eve Sindrome, 2001, etc.) and studied hypnosis for more than 60 years. He is still an active author and lecturer at 83, counseling people nightly on his popular national radio show Advice Line. Masters believes that through fear, anxiety, low self-esteem, resentment and addiction to drugs or pornography you are living life in a hypnotized state. Every time you make an excuse, you are denying reality and giving power over to something else, something evil. By Masters’ account, all of America is asleep, as is much of the rest of the world. Additionally, immoral societies, governments and renegade clergy leaders are hypnotizing you into a life of sin. Masters’ quasi New Age philosophy of meditation, “Be Still and Know,” preaches calm and patience through the exercises outlined in the book’s appendix. Although skeptical at first, upon practicing the exercises there was indeed proof of the value to be gleaned. On the other hand, the book is dismissive of women (emotionally weak, thus leading men to sin), rails against ambitious people and compares homosexuals to drug addicts and Nazis in one failed analogy. This casts some shade on Masters’ otherwise genuine intent to help people heal and be happy.
A solid read for devout Christians, conservatives and self-help book aficionados; skeptics and atheists may find it hard to swallow.Pub Date: May 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1460939024
Page Count: 293
Publisher: Foundation of Human Understanding
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2011
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
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