A stark and honest investigation into the author’s personal ordeals.
A woman examines the trauma of her past in order to offer advice to others in this self-help work.
As readers go through life, they are writing their own users’ manuals via a process of trial and error. “When do our manuals start?” writes Wheeler (Be Your Own Best Friend, 2015). “I think they start as soon as we realize that certain feelings resonated with certain awarenesses. For example, the first time I saw violence, I was aware that it wasn’t right and that it hurt me.” Violence was, unfortunately, a mainstay in the author’s life from early childhood to adulthood. According to Wheeler, her father was physically abusive to her and her siblings, and her stepfather was sexually abusive to her during her teen years. A lack of role models and poor decisions led to a series of abusive relationships with boyfriends, culminating in the tragic and vicious end of her first marriage. Despite the violence, drug use, emotional abuse, suicidal thoughts, and morally difficult decisions, the author managed to turn her life around by seeking help and discovering her inner strength. She discusses the impact of medication, therapy, spirituality, and family on her healing process, offering readers one possible manual they might follow to make their own lives better. Wheeler writes in a simple but honest prose that presents the difficulties she has faced in a frank, almost journalistic manner: “I started thinking of ways to kill myself. I would take a lot of Tylenol with the alcohol I stole from my mom. I would try to cut my wrists, but I wouldn’t follow through because it hurt to push through my skin.” Despite her deep well of traumatic experiences, the author never writes from a place of presumed expertise. While she discusses the importance of faith in her life, she does not frame it in a way that makes it seem as though readers must also adopt it. She simply recounts her experiences and what she has learned from them, and, for readers, seeing this evolution will likely be more affecting than the checklists and posed questions of more polished works in the genre.
A stark and honest investigation into the author’s personal ordeals.Pub Date: March 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5043-9935-7
Page Count: 108
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2018
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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