An appealing guide to lessening anxiety and increasing overall wellness.
At the start of the book, the debut author, a licensed psychotherapist, notes that her work is not intended to replace medical or psychiatric treatment and advises seeking professional help to deal with the effects of trauma or anxiety that occurs along with depression. In the pages that follow, readers can find simple and practical tools for coping with difficult circumstances. Even people who’ve had past experience with therapy are likely to find ideas in the book that they’ll find beneficial. A popular phrase in the world of psychiatry is “name it to tame it,” and Leeds seems to draw on this idea, attempting to help readers identify ways to “claim” and therefore “name,” their anxiety. Putting a name to stressful thoughts and feelings, this book notes, puts one on the path to lessening or eliminating them. The author helpfully includes specific tools for reframing anxiety via techniques such as cognitive behavioral therapy, self-help author Byron Katie’s “The Work,” and focusing on the positive. Leeds’ good-natured tone and sense of humor are evident throughout, with chapter titles such as “The Importance of Not Being Perfekt” that also manage to drive her points home. In the final section of the book, Leeds gives readers several detailed methods to “tame” anxiety, such as breathing exercises, meditation, and tapping exercises. Many of these will be familiar to readers, but other notions, such as finding time for play or simply doing a brand-new activity, offer helpful reminders for trying times. The book is geared mainly toward women, and early on, the author notes that “Women in this country are twice as likely to be diagnosed with anxiety, and we’re much more likely to be put on medication than our male counterparts.” However, readers of any gender are likely to find useful support here in their quest for calmer lives.
An appealing guide to lessening anxiety and increasing overall wellness.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9999015-0-2
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Calm Day Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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