Common asks readers to better themselves, empowering them with the grace and courage to do so.
The rapper, actor, and advocate blends self-help with activist passion.
The idea of self-care could easily slip into privileged, Goop-type territory. While promoting his vegan chef’s recipes that include not-so-kitchen-staples like nama shoyu, burdock root, and dandelion, one might be tempted to think, “OK, but what about the rest of us?” In his latest book, the author offers a refreshing response: Self-care is for everyone. It’s especially important to him that the Black community internalizes this concept. “For Black women and Black men in America,” writes Common, “self-care is a revolutionary act….When you’re working against dark forces you’ve got to prepare yourself so that you can step forward with everything you’ve got.” Everything is connected, the author tells us, and so are the four parts of the book: The Food, The Body, The Mind, and The Soul (the most powerful section). These four areas depend on each other, and the combinations among them make us who we are. Common’s commitment to self-care is heavily inspired by his advocacy work. After all, he notes, you can’t be an effective activist without being an activist for yourself first. Common notes the inequities of the American health care system and how Black people experience significantly worse outcomes than other groups. “To change these outcomes, the system has to change,” he writes. “Until that happens, we have to do whatever we can to take care of our bodies and improve our own health….Our self-love is a shield we carry while we’re out there doing the work to take care of our loved ones and working for change for all of those who are caught in this system of hurt.” It’s a heartening message for those who appreciate self-help guidance.
Common asks readers to better themselves, empowering them with the grace and courage to do so.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780063215177
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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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