An earnest self-help manual that treads overly familiar ground.
Life coachand entrepreneurHamilton-Guarino offers a motivational guide for achieving success.
Hamilton-Guarino, the founder of the Best Ever You Network—which produces motivational guidebooks, podcasts, and magazines—aims to inspire readers to “Create awesomeness within” in this book. She begins with her own family’s rags-to-riches-to-rags-again story, which led to her decision to quit her jobin the finance sector and create the Best Ever You brand. Her strategies for success fall into three categories (“Visualize Your Success,” “Actualize Your Success,” and “Amplify Your Success”) and consist of 10 factors, including imagining what success looks like; believing in oneself; focusing one’s vision and energy; taking action toward achieving one’s goal; and six others, ending with toasting one’s success. Hamilton-Guarino illustrates her concepts with real-life anecdotes about successful people, such as Jesse Cole and Emily Cole (the founders of the exhibition baseball team, the Savannah Bananas) and Georgetown University baseball head coach Edwin Thompson. A recurring “Stories from the Heart” section features first-person accounts by others with impressive achievements, and “Points to Ponder” and journal prompts provide encouraging thought exercises. Hamilton-Guarino’s most notable contribution is her broadening of the definition of success; rather than using “conventional measurements such as data or the dollars in your bank account,” she asserts, one can see success “reflected in the smiles that brighten our faces and the peace that settles in our hearts.” Readers looking for an introduction to basic self-help ideas will find that this book does the job. However, those who are already familiar with the genre may feel that much of the advice draws on clichés, such as “Reach for the stars!” and “Believe in yourself.” Other encouragements, such as “Live your superpowers,” may strike some readers as saccharine. The text also suffers from excessive verbosity at times: “Success to me is in the relationships you have, the bonds you create, the network, and collaborations, and treating everyone you encounter with a sense of grace, compassion, elegance, kindness, peace, and genuine interest.”
An earnest self-help manual that treads overly familiar ground.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780757324802
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Health Communications Inc.
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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
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