A knowledgeable and empathetic manual for dealing with trauma.
Darling offers strategies for trauma resolution in this nonfiction guide.
The author intends her book to help readers “heal past hurt, transcend limiting beliefs about themselves and others, and change behaviors that limit their potential to be present and empathetic in every moment.” Darling cites a 2016 survey indicating that an overwhelming percentage of the world’s nearly 8 billion people would report experiencing some kind of trauma at some point in their lives—the author posits that these traumatic experiences can lead to a broad range of “reactive” behaviors including hating, blaming, criticizing, fixating, and withdrawing. In these pages, Darling advocates “responsive” behaviors, which are more holistic and include actions such as contemplation, reflection, and forgiveness; these practices, the author asserts, will help readers to “rewrite [their] past into a more hopeful present.” Darling uses her own experiences with trauma and healing as a springboard to broader discussions informed by her experience as “a critical consumer of trauma research, a savvy vetter of trauma-healing therapists, and a seasoned explorer of tools to heal my own trauma.” She examines many aspects of trauma and PTSD and their links to habits such as smoking, drinking, or other substance abuse, and she considers the potential benefits of treatments like the trademarked Somatic Experiencing [SE] therapy, which focuses on healing bodily trauma. Darling organically weaves these threads into her discussion about the ways SE can be combined with meditation and reflection to heal both body and mind. The author’s use of stories of people involved in various crises (both her own and those of others) is likewise smoothly and effectively handled. Readers dealing with all manner of stress and trauma might not adopt every approach Darling outlines in her wide-ranging guide, but they’ll find thought-provoking new ways to deal with lingering pain and damage.
A knowledgeable and empathetic manual for dealing with trauma.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Empower Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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