An encouraging guide to a healthy mindset.
A survey of strategies for self-discovery.
Marriott, a group psychotherapist and clinical social worker, and Kelley, a psychologist, co-host the podcast Therapist Uncensored. In this collaboration, they offer thoughtful, well-supported advice for fostering personal growth and nurturing social bonds. Identifying themselves as a white, cis-gendered, middle-aged, same-sex married couple, the authors aim to be inclusive and supportive of all readers. As they point out, people of color or those who are neurodiverse or genderqueer have been shaped by distinct, sometimes traumatic, experiences. “Plumb your various identities,” the authors advise, and think about “the impact of your experiences on the protective and connective strategies you’ve developed, weighing their current usefulness.” Drawing on modern attachment theory and relational neuroscience, Marriott and Kelley look at how unconscious defensive patterns can be transformed into conscious strengths. The Modern Attachment-Regulation Spectrum (MARS), depicted as rainbow-colored images, serves as a colorful illustration of one’s state of mind, with green being a safe zone, gradations toward red indicating emotional activation, and gradations toward blue indicating defensive withdrawal. In an appendix, the authors provide a detailed analysis of the spectrum and its connection to behavior and emotion. The MARS, they write, can prove useful for readers “to recognize where you are and turn your focus toward scooting back towards the green zone rather quickly.” The authors present ways to reflect on behavior, recognize patterns, and work “to pause and try different strategies,” a process they call rewiring. “A secure state of mind,” the authors assert, “enables you to care about, advocate for and be generous with people close to you and those you’ll never meet. In this way, making the deliberate choice to prioritize secure functioning over falling back into defensive self-preservation is a powerful action that can disrupt, and even reverse” divisiveness and polarization.
An encouraging guide to a healthy mindset.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780063334557
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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