A manual that should be highly therapeutic for the fearful and anxious.
A guide provides practical tactics for facing up to fear.
Australian physician Sedhoff has written a self-help book that goes far beyond the terror associated with Covid-19. This eminently readable text addresses fear in the larger sense, offering an authoritative overview of the subject as well as a programmatic way to “resolve” one’s apprehensions. Part 1 begins with an illuminating introduction to the ways in which fear affects the brain specifically and individuals in general. The author then dives into a seven-stage process designed to reduce the “fear burden.” Each of these stages contains numerous, clearly identified actions to take, such as four mindfulness skills, four “methods to create structure and routine,” and three steps to overcome social anxieties. One of the more intriguing chapters in the first part of the book concerns how the media can heighten various forms of fear. Part 2 takes a more novel approach: Here, Sedhoff suggests strategies for turning the “fear monster to friend.” The author characterizes the fear monster as “ ‘a balloon monster’…that looks real on the outside, but get inside it and we find it is full of hot air.” Using this imagery helps to amusingly but dramatically undermine the frightening aspects of fear and leads into a 10-step method for overcoming any type of anxiety. What Sedhoff does next is ingenious: After summarizing the guide in a chapter that acts as a “mini-workbook,” he illustrates in discrete chapters how the 10-step method applies to taming the fear of severe illness, death, Covid-19, and PTSD—the last included “because PTSD and the fear it elicits are so extreme, but also because it can be challenging to navigate out of.” In the final chapter the author concludes: “Unless we walk with fear and talk to it regularly, it can lead us down dangerous paths that we may not know we are taking until it is too late.” Sedhoff’s voice throughout the volume is compassionate, calming, and reassuring. The numerous, diverse examples of scared patients helped by the author add richness to the work and credibility to his methodology.
A manual that should be highly therapeutic for the fearful and anxious.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2022
ISBN: 9780994609144
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Senraan Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.
Portraits in a post-pandemic world.
After the Covid-19 lockdowns left New York City’s streets empty, many claimed that the city was “gone forever.” It was those words that inspired Stanton, whose previous collections include Humans of New York (2013), Humans of New York: Stories (2015), and Humans (2020), to return to the well once more for a new love letter to the city’s humanity and diversity. Beautifully laid out in hardcover with crisp, bright images, each portrait of a New Yorker is accompanied by sparse but potent quotes from Stanton’s interviews with his subjects. Early in the book, the author sequences three portraits—a couple laughing, then looking serious, then the woman with tears in her eyes—as they recount the arc of their relationship, transforming each emotional beat of their story into an affecting visual narrative. In another, an unhoused man sits on the street, his husky eating out of his hand. The caption: “I’m a late bloomer.” Though the pandemic isn’t mentioned often, Stanton focuses much of the book on optimistic stories of the post-pandemic era. Among the most notable profiles is Myles Smutney, founder of the Free Store Project, whose story of reclaiming boarded‑up buildings during the lockdowns speaks to the city’s resilience. In reusing the same formula from his previous books, the author confirms his thesis: New York isn’t going anywhere. As he writes in his lyrical prologue, “Just as one might dive among coral reefs to marvel at nature, one can come to New York City to marvel at humanity.” The book’s optimism paints New York as a city where diverse lives converge in moments of beauty, joy, and collective hope.
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781250277589
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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