An energetic, optimistic, and worthwhile blueprint for adding mindfulness to daily life.
A debut guide offers a multipronged plan for improving health and well-being.
The wheel at the heart of Martin’s slim book has “community” at its hub. Twenty years of wide-ranging reading and experiences have left the author with the strong conviction that community—friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors—is the crucial center of gravity for a healthy, well-grounded life. “Human beings are social animals,” she writes. “Community is where it starts and where it ends.” The rest of the wheel—the different parts of the hub circling that center—is made up of the six ingredients that “add up to optimum emotional, physical, and spiritual wellness.” Those items are “Purpose,” “Mindset,” “Sleep,” “Constitution,” “Lifestyle,” and “Food.” Over the course of the manual, Martin elaborates on each of these components, first giving her readers several tips on how to build the kind of community that sustains those elements. After that, each ingredient is discussed at length—and in surprising detail for so short a book. She takes readers through the basis of a sound diet, the outlines of a “sleep survival tool kit” (citing, for instance, the current figures of chronic sleep deprivation in the United States and the deleterious health effects associated with that), and alternate methods of understanding health paradigms, such as India’s Ayurvedic lifestyle. She delivers all of this advice with a breezy, optimistic tone that’s immediately inviting to readers, especially those who may be feeling guilty or touchy about neglecting such basics as “seek out activities you enjoy,” “get out in nature,” and “walk, walk, walk.” Some of this advice is too simplistic—“You are what you think,” and “Do what makes you happy.” But most of the counsel achieves a very pleasing mix of practical and aspirational. In addition, the guide is well designed: The visuals very much help to break down the main points.
An energetic, optimistic, and worthwhile blueprint for adding mindfulness to daily life.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-03-911752-5
Page Count: 180
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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
© 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.
