An uplifting combination of helpful meditative practices and practical how-to guide that encourages readers to start fresh.
Timmins presents an artful blend of flower arranging know-how and inspirational self-help in this nonfiction guide.
Using flower arranging as a form of therapy, the author introduces readers to the positive mental and emotional influences of the natural world. Each chapter tackles a new area of self-improvement, including acceptance, forgiveness, connection, love, gratitude, contribution, vision, alignment, courage, and purpose. The text incorporates personal anecdotes illustrating how Timmins’ previously black-and-white view of the world has changed as she’s gotten older and reminding readers of the simple joys of receiving flowers. Linked with each aspect of self-improvement is a different flower arrangement project that includes all the ingredients and directions readers need to complete it (acceptance pairs with a seasonal bouquet, while forgiveness pairs with a terrarium). Gorgeous color photos show what the arrangements might ideally look like, although the author insists that flower styling can and should be highly individualized: “This is the true therapy of arranging flowers. The flowers will guide you by their shape, size, colour, texture and directional flow, which are all elements of design. Go with their flow and you will step into your state of flow.” Chapters also include guided meditations, including an exercise in which one envisions one’s heart as a flower full of petals that slowly unfurl with each breath. Engaging flower trivia is scattered throughout, such as the fact that a rose vibrates at a frequency of 320 MHz (compared to, say, an apple that vibrates at around 15 MHz). All of this information—therapeutic, botanical, scientific—fuses into a joyful and engaging text that even self-proclaimed “black thumbs” will likely find irresistible. Written with a warm, friendly, open-hearted style, it truly feels as though Timmins is a good friend whose mere presence (and frequent words of wisdom) helps make the day brighter. The jaw-dropping flower arrangements don’t hurt either.
An uplifting combination of helpful meditative practices and practical how-to guide that encourages readers to start fresh.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2021
ISBN: 9781982291631
Page Count: 114
Publisher: BalboaPressAU
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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