A helpful holistic guide to improving health via a stronger connection to one’s own consciousness.
A physician offers tools to enhance readers’ lives in this debut motivational work.
Modern medicine, for all its abilities, can treat diseases but not the life conditions that cause those illnesses. So says Hall in the introduction to this nonfiction book on improving one’s life and health: “The next level” in medicine “works to change what brought that problem or issue into your life in the first place. The current level treats symptoms; the next level treats causes. When you do both, you have a complete system of healing that you can apply to any and all problems you are facing.” The author provides specific strategies for turning around not only the tangibles in life, but the intangibles as well. He terms these strategies the “seven tools,” and he has fashioned them through years of clinical experience with patients who required more than just the traditional treatment of their medical issues. After an exploration of the concepts of “Consciousness” and “Healing,” Hall breaks down the seven tools, explaining their relationships to human wellness and how patients can make use of them in their daily lives. For example, the third tool is “Acceptance” (which doesn’t mean settling for the condition that you are in so much as being aware of your present circumstances): “Practice becoming aware of the truth all around you and within you. Use your powers of observation and discernment for this. Watch the information that comes to you through your five senses. Watch the thoughts that flow through your mind.” This holistic approach to health is hardly new, and the author is not the first person to write a book about it. Indeed, most of what is here can be found in other sources. But Hall does approach his subject more deliberatively and thoughtfully than most, and there are a number of idiosyncratic flourishes here that are quite enjoyable. (He includes, for example, an entire appendix on metaphors, including beneficial ones for thinking about one’s inner healer.) Those seeking an accessible philosophical companion to their usual medical regimens should find Hall’s volume useful.
A helpful holistic guide to improving health via a stronger connection to one’s own consciousness.Pub Date: March 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5043-9760-5
Page Count: 324
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2020
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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