A sturdy, cleareyed view of addiction as controllable and ultimately surmountable.
In this descriptive, narrative-driven account of addiction, the author challenges modern perceptions of addicts and offers a fresh approach to rehabilitation.
Groenewald describes himself as a “lesser spotted addict,” a person who has neither studied addiction at the collegiate level nor helped rehabilitate a family member or a friend. What he has done is create a theory about addiction based on personal experience and close scrutiny of others. Groenewald challenges the idea that an addict is powerless over his or her addiction, that substances could in fact rule over the human mind and body. His approach is controversial, as it undoes some of the major work of the past few decades in treating addiction as a disease requiring careful handling. Instead, Groenewald creates commandments, or statements that must be adopted by an addict willing to put in the work to recover. These include mantras such as, “We assert that we are not powerless,” and “We acknowledge that our behavior...has caused harm to others and ourselves.” It is only with these acceptances, Groenewald argues, that a person struggling with addiction can rise to take steps toward an addiction-free life. In one instance, the author presents an anecdote about overcoming a habit of using ChapStick. Though small-scale, the compulsion to reach for ChapStick each time lips become dry is a repetitive, comfort-seeking behavior—a description that might match other addictions, from food to heroin to cigarettes or shopping. The book is well-organized into “articles of association” that unfold the many layers of self-awareness an addict must develop. What’s more, each article is written in a pluralistic “we,” simultaneously indicating both the author and the reader, for a collective spirit that allows the message to feel less like an attack and more of a team rally or game plan. While each chapter does delve deeper into the themes of self-awareness and accountability, many of the associations are one and the same. For example, accepting that behaviors harm the self and others is quite similar to Article Eight, which states: “We acknowledge the existence of interconnectivity between all living things.” Nonetheless, strong messages like this merit repeating, and Groenewald has created an easily digestible swift kick for anyone tired of hiding behind powerlessness.
A sturdy, cleareyed view of addiction as controllable and ultimately surmountable.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4781-4403-8
Page Count: 172
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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