A pleasant, gentle spiritual reference guide for daily meditation.
In this self-help guide, a certified energy-medicine practitioner offers a year’s worth of daily inspirational thoughts.
Friesen, once a computer programmer and web designer earning six figures, left the corporate world to become a full-time mom. She eventually became an energy-medicine practitioner and reiki master who came to believe that “no one is broken and no one needs to be fixed; we are Self Evolving.” This embracing philosophy is at the heart of her book, which consists of 365 brief, generally single-page entries of exploration and inquiry into personal development, personal consciousness and life choices. The entries usually include quotations, which come from both expected sources (Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson) and unexpected ones (The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics). Friesen acknowledges that the entries came from her “own self-talk to help me ride out my emotions” and that readers may take them either sequentially or at random. Topics with such titles as “Experience stillness,” “You get what you prepare for” and “Direct your own evolution” end with Friesen musing, “Think about it…Love and Sunshine, Tracy.” It’s rather difficult to find fault with such a sunny overall spirit, except for some missed opportunities to tie an entry’s theme into its specific day. For December 25, for example, Friesen entitles her piece “You were meant to be happy,” which is certainly inspiring, but she doesn’t mention the stress and expectations that many readers may feel around the Christmas holiday. Other entries are quite skimpy—just a few sentences of rather generalized sentiment—and readers looking for step-by-step instruction will have to look elsewhere. Still, simply taking time out each day to read and ponder these reflections may be fine self-help advice in itself. As Friesen notes, “You never know what you may find for yourself along the way.”
A pleasant, gentle spiritual reference guide for daily meditation.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1460204375
Page Count: 456
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2013
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
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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