A quiet, sane, nonconfrontational call for people to take control of enjoying their lives—an important lesson in this...
A medical doctor, and cancer survivor, proposes steps for better living.
While Melemis’ book covers a lot of ground, including depression (clinical and otherwise), panic attacks, job performance and addiction, his principal focus stays the same—tension. He identifies tension as the most powerful and insidious damaging agent in modern life and the bulk of his low-key, accessible book (reading it feels like sitting in the audience at a seminar, giving the impression that Melemis is a rather engaging speaker) is concerned with developing strategies to combat stress. Not surprisingly, his main strategy is to calm down and relax. Melemis is an advocate of an informal and largely self-administered form of cognitive therapy in which participants keep a “thought journal” detailing negative experiences, with the goal of uncluttering the mind’s responses to those experiences. His simple assertion that “[t]here is magic in writing” manages, like the rest of the book, to come off as genuinely thoughtful rather than simplistic. There is throughout the book an air of hard-won certainty that is most noticeable in the later chapters on addiction, recovery and relapse-avoidance. Here, his stance is that of a positive, supportive coach rather than a medical practitioner. For example, while counseling addicts who might be thinking of using again, he sounds like a friend: “Remind yourself of how much better you feel now that you’ve stopped using. Think of how nice it is that you don’t have to lie. Your mind is clearer. You have more energy. Your mood is improving. Do you really want to blow all that?” It’s difficult to imagine a person in the grip of addiction for whom this advice would not be helpful. And Melemis’ underlying point—that perhaps more people are addicted to stressful behavior than are willing to admit it—is well-taken.
A quiet, sane, nonconfrontational call for people to take control of enjoying their lives—an important lesson in this frantic 21st century.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1897572238
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Modern Therapies
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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