by Sylvie Heyman ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2017
A well-researched, if scattered, guide to making positive changes.
A registered nurse, chiropractor, and acupuncturist explores why habits form and how to break them.
Debut author Heyman draws from her professional experiences to demystify how habits develop and offer strategies to squelch the harmful ones. “Forty to 45 percent of our daily actions are based on habits,” she states in her introduction. Given that so much of human behavior is routine, it’s no wonder habits are hard to break. “The brain is basically lazy,” Heyman explains. “If it has the opportunity to funnel behaviors to a place where they become automatic, requiring little conscious thinking, it will do so in a flash.” Habits begin with a cue that leads to a response followed by a reward. The brain remembers the reward and automates the cycle. Habits streamline life, but they can also result in patterns that jeopardize health. Resolve alone isn’t enough to overcome a bad habit: “Willpower is like a muscle. It loses strength, gets tired and is depleted after overuse.” To change, people must have motivation and readiness. Heyman lays out six different theories on how the former arises and six stages of the latter. She supplements these steps with stories of people who have successfully changed habits like interrupting, compulsive shopping, bingeing, and obsessive Facebook checking. Common threads among those who triumphed include making “s.m.a.r.t.” (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time framed) goals, rewarding oneself, keeping a journal to track victories, and stating objectives in a positive tone. The author delivers plenty of useful advice for sustaining good habits: she advocates a healthy diet, sufficient sleep, regular exercise, and meditation. She also touches briefly on spiritual habits, such as prayers and mantras. Heyman emphasizes the importance of awareness, action, and accountability: “The real problem is not ignorance; it’s non-compliance,” she insists. While the author’s tone is affable, providing clear explanations and rendering her key points in boldface or with bullets, this book is less of a step-by-step manual and more of a theoretical buffet. If one has difficulty effecting change, this volume’s plethora of approaches might overwhelm and prevent the kind of commitment required for habit-breaking.
A well-researched, if scattered, guide to making positive changes.Pub Date: March 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4787-7830-1
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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