A straightforward guide for rolling up your sleeves and being enlightened.
A reformed underachiever and armchair philosopher puts his thoughts and ideas into action tackling some of life’s biggest existential issues: meaning, purpose and fulfillment.
At a time of profound personal confusion, it didn’t sit well with Whitaker when he was told by his brotherthat, sorry, you’re just “uncoachable.” But when the author’s brother delivered this sobering pronouncement, something moved inside the frustrated entrepreneur and sometimes writer. It spurred him to act, to take stock of his life and to confront the causes of his unhappiness. Whitaker found that it was his entrenched thought patterns, ideas and beliefs about his life that were causing him great pain and suffering. Powerful messages from an insatiable media delivering fear one moment and materialism the next had pummeled Whitaker into submission and set him on a hollow life’s journey that many may find all too familiar. “The story you’ve been forced to read—by your family, friends, the media, the marketers, the retailers, and religion,” he says, is “a churning amalgam of material success pursuits, eternal salvation, hellfire, celebrity worship, lifestyle envy, salving bromides, wedding days, dismaying divorce, apocalyptic distraction, fear-based economics, and age-old wisdom about embracing life’s simple things (meant to stem the rising panic inside).”The author devotes much of his lively narrative to railing against these modern evils—as well as taking aim at organized religion and even unhelpful family and friends—before getting down to work. And hard work is exactly what Whitaker’s approachis all about. At its heart, the author’s debut is a guide for personal growth and reflection, which requires readers to first dig deep into their own psyches in order to formulate a moral code, a values code and an ideals code. With these elemental building blocks in place, Whitaker promises that the meaning of life—or rather, the meaning of your life—will become apparent. “This is one of the most important realizations to embrace,” he says. “The meaning of life is different for everyone, even close friends or family members.” Eschewing whatever possibilities may or may not exist beyond our current life spans, Whitaker instead roots his system for personal and perpetual self-fulfillment in this current reality. The blue-collar approach is one that many earnest self-help seekers will find refreshingly free of supernatural or mystical components. But they must first commit to completing the self-analytical exercises that Whitaker puts forth.
A straightforward guide for rolling up your sleeves and being enlightened.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-0991479801
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Oddward TKE
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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