A debut manual offers a perspective on fitness that incorporates meditation, awareness, and energy patterns.
From the very beginning, Wise sets her book apart from other works by fitness experts by focusing on the “BodyLogos story,” which the author describes as the gift of “total alignment.” Throughout the title, Wise sets out to show readers how to reach this goal through a practice regimen that builds awareness of breathing, the mind, and the body. Steering readers through different workouts, she explains the spiritual and psychological significance of each part of the body. With exercises and in-depth explanations, the author teaches readers how to target various muscles. For example, she explains that many smaller muscles and joints typically interfere with a biceps exercise. Removing the effect of these elements can be “helpful” for understanding “what an isolated biceps contraction feels like.” Skillful graphics by debut illustrator Elefante and concise text boxes help instruct readers on performing an exercise with perfect awareness of a specific muscle. The book’s effective design, which includes photographs by Sanders (Chino, 2011, etc.), offers logistical advice about each exercise, along with spiritual guidance. The volume encourages readers to practice meditation and mindfulness and channel gratitude and compassion. Perhaps one of the most compelling sections discusses anger, an important concept for anyone facing physical challenges. “You can identify resistance to genuine emotion by recognizing whether you are opposing or ignoring your experience,” Wise explains. “When you are in resistance to having an experience, you are in judgment of the experience.” These thoughtful passages throughout the book make the title more than just a useful addition to the fitness and health genre. The volume provides readers with valuable tips on promoting inner development and bolstering the mind.
A captivating, successful, and well-illustrated guide to strengthening the mind and body.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982209-46-9
Page Count: 410
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: HEALTH & FITNESS | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HEALTH & FITNESS
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