This entertaining, spirited work promotes self-improvement in a highly amusing and quirky way.
A picture book aimed at adults offers advice on emotional health.
Life provides its share of hardships and frustrations. Some people respond to all the pressure by bottling up their emotions. But Corchin recommends that readers unleash whatever emotions they are feeling. If it’s rage, he suggests flipping a table or blowing up and popping balloons. For those who feel depressed or unhappy, it’s OK to cry and belt out sad songs or spend an entire day binging on melancholy movies. While the author, who’s previously written children’s books on similar topics, goes for laughs, this is a bona-fide self-help manual. So much of what he urges readers to do are healthy coping mechanisms that harm no one. He doesn’t simply deliver advice on how to react, but recommends possible ways to avoid stress or things that cause anxiety. For example, Corchin tells readers to ignore social media influencers; many of those seemingly perfect people who are always posting online are anything but. The author moreover advocates the potential benefits of therapy as well as medications that a physician might prescribe. As this is a picture book, messages are also relayed through Dougherty’s artwork. The characters are depicted subverting or overcoming negativity by exercising at the gym, gleefully devouring a whole cake, and hugging a pillow, a cat, or one another.
Corchin’s words and Dougherty’s illustrations complement each other throughout this rib-tickling work. The author, for instance, proposes dealing with anger by flipping off a squirrel—and there’s a cute gray one clearly startled to see a man do just that. The breezy prose gives the impression of tough love, primarily through the author dropping expletives with reckless abandon. But the advice is more obliging than pushy—and often zany: “You want to try therapy? Yes! Fucking do it. Everybody’s doing it.” Dougherty’s multihued art is impeccable, teeming with bold lines, sharp colors, and rich character and background details. Facial expressions are especially effective, as it’s easy to distinguish between such temperaments as anger, sorrow, and even boredom. But he truly excels at lighting effects, from a TV or a cellphone emitting a calming bluish tone to sunlight painting a living room with giant windows a beautiful amber. The lighting also helps establish characters’ moods. Some individuals scouring their personal laptops for new jobs (per Corchin’s recommendation) look peaceful, with their computer screens brightening their faces as they sit in a strip club filled with muted shades. The players prove as colorful as the backdrops; the diverse cast features different races, gender identifications, and body shapes. The engaging story shows how people from around the world and all walks of life endure similar problems and may need a helping hand. Or, if the situation calls for it, an upraised middle finger.
This entertaining, spirited work promotes self-improvement in a highly amusing and quirky way.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 54
Publisher: phazelFOZ Company, LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
