Headlee offers little groundbreaking information, but her advice is well taken and will prove useful for harried readers.
An argument against the notion that “our carefully designed strategies and gadgets will make us better.”
As a popular radio host, journalist, and speaker, Headlee (We Need To Talk: How To Have Conversations That Matter, 2017) has plenty of experience in trying—and often failing—to achieve the so-called work-life balance. “While I’d always been driven, I’d also been exhausted, stressed, and overwhelmed,” writes the author of her years of struggle to advance her career, pay the bills, and manage the responsibilities of being a single mother. She had hoped that “when I achieved financial stability, my stress would end.” However, the opposite was true: Once she was offered bigger money for speeches and other jobs, it was tougher to turn them down. “If your goal is less stress and more happiness,” she writes, “years of scientific research have proven that better than trading your time for money, it’s best to trade your money for time.” Easier said than done, and though Headlee remains highly productive, with a schedule that will leave many readers breathless, she does an effective job of showing how the Industrial Revolution changed the time-money equation, how multitasking makes us less focused and efficient, why connecting online rather than engaging in human interaction can be dehumanizing, and how you can feel better about your life by acting kindly. Among her many suggestions: Engage in conversation with four strangers per day; keep track of how you are spending your time, because you’re probably not as busy as you think you are; and acknowledge that downtime can make you more creative and productive as well as happier. Readers are advised not to take the author’s title literally, because there is so much that can be done to reassert the importance of leisure in life, including reading a book about it.
Headlee offers little groundbreaking information, but her advice is well taken and will prove useful for harried readers.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2473-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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