A lucid guide to burnout with valuable content for employees, employers, and medical professionals.
A physician offers a prescription for overcoming burnout.
According to Khan (Unlocking the Natural-Born Leader’s Abilities, 2017), “workplace burnout is becoming a national epidemic,” and it has not yet been identified as “purely a medical or psychiatric illness.” The author’s antidote is a “self-care solution”; he offers intelligent, if at times repetitive, advice to diagnose and treat burnout. Khan begins with lyrics to a “Burnout Awareness Song” as well as “Burnout Self-Care Poetry,” both of which seem a bit odd, yet they immediately put the problem on a personal level. Of greater significance is the material concerning self-assessment in the first chapter; in addition to addressing how personality plays a role in the condition, the author includes a scoring tool that helps readers determine their burnout levels. Khan then presents some research regarding the condition followed by a discussion of workplace burnout. One of the more engaging and perhaps strongest aspects of the book is how the author relates burnout to the medical profession. He provides useful advice for primary care doctors about the diagnosis of burnout (again using a scoring tool), but he also adds a very personal element to the book by discussing his own professional experience with the condition. During his career as an attending physician and pulmonologist, Khan was under tremendous pressure as his responsibilities dramatically increased; he had “to learn how I did all that extra hard work with excellence without severe burnout.” His keen insights and observations of himself and others lend a particularly powerful element to this manual. Later, the author identifies what he believes are “eighteen phases of burnout,” describing each one and adding his recommendations for dealing with it—instructive, if somewhat overwhelming. It is the “Step-by-Step Self-Care Solution” that is likely to be the most pertinent portion of the volume. Here Khan gently but firmly walks readers through a series of steps to avoid burnout and treat it. He also talks about how to prevent future burnout and offers some helpful ways to reduce workplace stress in order to minimize the condition.
A lucid guide to burnout with valuable content for employees, employers, and medical professionals.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4808-8332-1
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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