A captivating, successful, and well-illustrated guide to strengthening the mind and body.
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
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
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
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