An energetic guide to bringing greater intentionality to daily life.
DeFoore provides a blueprint for greater mental clarity and effectiveness in this self-help guide.
“Goodfinding” is “the practice of gratitude for the benefits of your past experiences, appreciation of your present blessings and opportunities, and optimism about the positive possibilities that lie ahead for you,” writes the author, emphasizing what he refers to as the “time travel” aspect of the human mind, capable of pondering the past, assessing the present, and planning for the future. His practice involves three key changes in thinking: a shift from negative to positive thinking, a change from outer focus to inner focus (to remind the reader that one is “the driver of your own car, the captain of your own ship, and the creator of your own reality”), and a pivot from “living at effect” to “living at cause.” DeFoore asserts that by following this practice, one is “learning to use your brilliant mind to its maximum benefit, contributing to your own well-being and that of the world around you.” The author frequently references Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence (1995), assuring his readers that they have brilliant minds (“I’m not saying that because I know anything about your intelligence,” DeFoore writes; “I’m saying that because a brilliant mind is standard equipment in the human organism”). This tone of strong encouragement runs throughout the book, which advises readers on everything from improving their finances (“a positive relationship with money is essential to your ongoing health and happiness”) to the practice of “gratitude journaling.” The author has a large number of abstruse topics to cover, and he’s very much aided in doing so by a clear, straightforward, explanatory style when clarifying his terms: “If a thought, belief, or course of action promotes life, health, and happiness and doesn’t harm you or others,” he writes, “then it is authentically positive.” Such plainspoken bits of wisdom will make DeFoore’s book appealing to readers seeking a bit of reinvention.
An energetic guide to bringing greater intentionality to daily life.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2022
ISBN: 9798765235676
Page Count: 374
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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