A set of thoughtful, manageable destressing techniques that’s presented in a refreshingly straightforward manner.
Psychologist Bullis presents a concise handbook about maximizing coping skills in situations that cause anxiety.
The author, who has 25 years of experience as a therapist, uses composite and anonymized case studies to lay out how the elements of a well-known cycle—wanting to feel in control, being unable to do so, becoming morestressed, and again desiring control—can be interrupted. He presents suitable actions one can take, successfully illustrating how one can manage overwhelming anxiety and confounding obstacles. Each of the chapters features a story highlighting one person’s specific difficulties, followed by their learning process as they address them; these skills are the focus of exercises at the end of each chapter. Techniques are broken down into easy, manageable steps, which is particularly helpful in potentially confusing situations. Bullis’ advice and activities will be useful to those dealing with daily stresses, as well as with major events, such as illness, disability, or job loss. The book’s simple emphasis is on creating a plan and following through on implementing it. Some sections feel more perfunctory than others; every reader has already heard the dictum that “life is a journey,” for instance. For the most part, though, the author avoids clichés and instead provides useful assertions, such as “In the end we want to live a life with the fewest regrets possible and to feel we have fulfilled our true potential.” The book provides practical tips and effective exercises; one can read the first half for action-oriented help and the second half for more context about grief, adaptation, hope, and persistence. Overall, it’s likely to be a solid resource for its target audience; families facing major life changes, in particular, will appreciate its logic and wisdom.
A set of thoughtful, manageable destressing techniques that’s presented in a refreshingly straightforward manner.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1982279295
Page Count: 172
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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