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
Categories: EDUCATION
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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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
Categories: EDUCATION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
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