A tidy but undernourished entry in the crowded field of scientifically branded self-help.
A physicist turned entrepreneur proposes a scientific framework for finding happiness and purpose.
Cai, a Shanghai-born physics Ph.D. and businessman, builds his debut around the proposition that the scientific method (observe, theorize, test, refine) can be repurposed as a life philosophy. The book unfolds in three parts that loosely mirror the stages of human life. Part I lays the epistemological groundwork. Cai walks readers through Newton’s apple, Einstein’s equivalence principle, and the notion that self-consistent “theories” of living can be stress-tested like physical laws. Part II turns inward, asking readers to identify their own axioms, gather data from lived experience, and revise their beliefs when the evidence stops cooperating. Part III is oriented toward later life and deals with matching what you want with what you can realistically experience. Cai makes good use of illustrative anecdotes from famous thinkers and entrepreneurs. He reminds us that Churchill found his value system in middle age, Leonardo da Vinci realized his curiosity was cross-disciplinary, and Marco Polo and British adventurer Percy Fawcett represent our exploratory impulses. Cai threads in his own biography as an example, tracing his path from the Stevens Institute of Technology to his pivot from physics to entrepreneurship to meditations on his family and career. Each chapter closes with straightforward reflection questions. The balance of personal narrative to prescriptive method is competently calibrated, but the book only glances at the bigger questions about purpose, mortality, and aging that wise writers have grappled with over and over again. A passing encounter with Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations earns half a page before the narrative moves on. The scientific-method conceit also seems strained under closer examination. Dressing up ordinary reflections on life as axioms and correlations undermines the book’s sophisticated exterior, and the historical examples feel interchangeable and skimmed over rather than wrestled with. The book is earnest and well intentioned, but readers will be left hungry for deeper insights that never quite arrive.
A tidy but undernourished entry in the crowded field of scientifically branded self-help.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9798887505589
Page Count: 194
Publisher: ForbesBooks
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
© Copyright 2026 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.
