An earnest, comprehensive, if somewhat hazy, guide to the principles and practices of inner calming.
A manual offers a blueprint for liberating people through a deeper understanding of their inner selves.
In a prolonged and detailed call for his readers to experience the freedom of becoming the best versions of themselves, Nicholson seeks to take some of the core meditation and self-examination practices of Buddhism and distill them into descriptions of self-calming and interior focus methods. If practiced faithfully, the techniques will empower every reader to be “both a gentle caretaker of and a fierce advocate for the being you are.” The author begins his gradual approach with the basics of the human body, fundamental concerns like posture, breath control, and mass distribution, then moves on to more advanced conceptual matters, such as how to tame distraction during meditation. “If your eyes are looking at something with any sense of visual recognition—the floor in front of you, for instance,” he writes, “no matter how disengaged you may be in that looking, your attention is at best divided between the object of concentration and the looking at the floor.” Nicholson confesses to being aware of his position as a Westerner writing about these Eastern practices and mentions that “the only conscionable stance I can adopt is an ironic one.” The bulk of the guide is written with a palpable sincerity. As in many Eastern meditation books, that quality becomes a much-needed refuge from the element of obscurity that enters this account early on. “Once you can bring the object of concentration into a stable flow of momentariness, momentary events eventing,” goes one passage, “you will have come to an excellent place from which to consolidate everything you have experienced in practice so far.” Still, this thoughtful book will appeal to readers who are already adept at meditation and seek further insights.
An earnest, comprehensive, if somewhat hazy, guide to the principles and practices of inner calming.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2022
ISBN: 9781777916107
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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