An insightful and realistic self-help text.
A debut author tells of leaving the fashion industry to pursue a journey of self-care and healing.
Driven, perfectionist achievers, Brassard says, may project a facade of success to the world while hiding, and denying, their own tendencies toward anxiety, anger, and self-blame. The author changed careers in 1990, selling her fashion boutique in order to spend more time with her family. Still, she had unresolved pain—about her father’s death when she was 16 and about her “competitive nature”—that would no longer stay hidden. Seeking peace and a healthier sense of self, she explored yoga (later becoming an instructor), chakras, meditation, and mantras, and she eventually founded a healing center. In this self-help book, she clearly articulates her thoughts on how and why one’s protective impulses thwart one’s goals and cause further strife. It’s divided into two parts, with the first dealing with the difficulty of accepting imperfection, vulnerability, honesty, and trust, which may go against one’s hard-driving instincts. The second part demonstrates how going on this journey affects one’s body, mind, heart, and spirit. Her 40 practices aim to train readers to slow down, listen, feel, think, and question. Brassard’s advice is consistently down-to-earth in tone; for example, she says that rituals “can be as simple as your daily run to the coffee shop…or the walk you go on with your dog,” and many of the exercises, including the introductory meditation, take only three minutes to do. The author also practically warns against trying to do too much at once, emphasizing not execution but consistency: “More does not necessarily mean better, but always does mean better.” The book does take too long to get started, however; an initial note from the author, an introduction, and a summary of Part 1 before the first chapter could have been cut. It is nice to see a subject index, though—a helpful feature that’s often neglected in similar books. (Terry Walters, author of 2009’s Clean Food, provides a foreword.)
An insightful and realistic self-help text.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-946697-86-8
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Lifestyle Entrepreneurs Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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