An optimistic manual that delivers some innovative tips along with familiar advice.
A debut self-help guide offers positivity and the conviction that all readers can reach their goals to achieve ultimate joy.
With a mission in life to “help everyone in the world become happier,” Bite breaks down his program into three parts: set, plan, and commit. The sections, divided into short chapters, aim to help readers discover worthy personal goals and needs, plan for success through research and deadlines, and find the motivation to hit their targets. The author draws heavily from his own life experiences to stress the importance of seeing key objectives not as wants but as necessities, because “you have to believe that you need this goal to survive and it will prepare you mentally to do what it takes to achieve it.” Included are brief exercises to help readers distinguish influences, record goals, and visualize victories. The overarching message is to be positive above all else. Overall, Bite’s idea of success and what it takes to triumph is straightforward and idealistic: “If you want to become a football player just research, plan, practice, get everything that you have researched done and it will work out.…Everything is truly that simple, so long as you follow the proper steps you set out to do and ensure that you do them, then you will be able to accomplish everything you ever wanted and even have time to do more.” The positivity is invigorating, with useful advice presented throughout (make a vision board, create a reward system, use the calendar, research your goals). While there are many recommendations that self-help genre fans will recognize, the author sprinkles in several inventive tidbits. For example, he encourages readers to tackle something they love first thing in the morning to help them get out of bed, and to get into the habit of thinking undertakings will be “easy” rather than impossible.
An optimistic manual that delivers some innovative tips along with familiar advice.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5043-8585-5
Page Count: 116
Publisher: Balboa
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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