A fast-paced and appealingly personal self-help manual.
A debut book offers a “survival guide” to life.
The idea of “neuroplasticity” is at the heart of this pithy collection of tips: the importance of always learning from and mentally adapting to the surprises and setbacks that life inevitably throws in the way. The inborn nature of the readily available survival tools is key: The authors stress throughout that readers have the equipment they need to solve their own problems and remake their initial assumptions. “Just like you choose to landscape your property or your body hair, remove a stain from your favorite shirt, remodel your Harley, or purposely rip a pair of jeans to make them stylish,” the Therapy Twins write, “if you don’t like where you are you can change it!” They emphasize to readers that the mind is the steering wheel of the brain, and they underscore the pragmatic side of their advice-giving by weaving into the narrative snippets of their own personal lives and the lessons they’ve learned both from their own strengths and their own weaknesses. This is all done briskly and without sentimentality, since they likewise caution against carrying around negative memories like badges of honor. How can readers live in the present, they ask, if they’re letting their pasts govern their lives? “Take back your power and free yourself from the grips of the past,” they assert in a typically upbeat line. Indeed, this note of optimism is struck repeatedly in the book, with the authors reminding their readers to be kind to themselves and choose “some tip-top thoughts” to help them steer their reflections and possibly reshape their realities. As a result, they will become the drivers of their own stories instead of wounded and resentful recipients of personal narratives that only do harm. Although most of the maxims provided in these pages are simple (and sometimes trite) enough to be ubiquitous in the self-help genre, the clear and optimistic tone the authors maintain makes the book very approachable. And their personal tales greatly enhance what might otherwise have been a fairly lightweight assemblage of aphorisms.
A fast-paced and appealingly personal self-help manual.Pub Date: July 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-8229-8
Page Count: 56
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2018
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
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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