Talking animals effectively teach readers to move from despair to solutions.
A group of metaphorical creatures presents lessons about perseverance and mental strength in this guide.
In this follow-up to The Ant and the Elephant (2004), Poscente returns to the two animals who are his stand-ins for the conscious (ant) and subconscious (elephant) minds. Adir the Ant and Elgo the Elephant go everywhere together. Adir has learned how to make sure he and Elgo are working toward the same purpose in pursuit of excellence. Their idyllic existence is interrupted by an earthquake that destroys their home—and Adir’s extensive and highly leveraged real estate enterprise—and the two fall into despondency. After trying to rebuild as all their animal neighbors leave the area, Adir and Elgo eventually set out on a quest for a safe place to serve as a new home. With periodic advice from Brio the Owl, Adir and Elgo set goals for themselves, find a path through unfamiliar territory, and learn new ways to work together. They also face external challenges: Villains Chromia the Wolf and Valafar the Vulture see Adir and Elgo as potential prey. When Adir and Elgo’s conflicts aren’t driving them further from their goals, the predators are. By implementing Brio’s lessons (“Adir, criticism is like manure. It stinks but helps you grow”), Adir and Elgo are eventually able to triumph. In the introduction, Poscente writes that the book was inspired by his “own personal earthquake,” a confluence of bad financial decisions coupled with the falloff of his public speaking business during the recession of the late 2000s, which forced him to learn the lessons Adir and Elgo discover in the story. While the talking animal storyline may not appeal to all readers, it follows the successful path of earlier titles like Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese? (1998) and Holden Rothgeber and John Kotter’s Our Iceberg Is Melting (2006) and does so equally well. Each chapter ends with a restatement of the pithy lessons taught by the tale, presented as an entry in Adir’s collection of notes to himself. The volume’s insights will be familiar to pop-psychology veterans, but the format is a smooth and persuasive way of concisely presenting them to new audiences.
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-953295-71-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Matt Holt/BenBella
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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