A joyful book that will appeal most to self-help enthusiasts, but some tips may resonate with a broader audience.
Lee’s (Chance, 2017, etc.) newest entry in his Body & Brain series discusses the benefits of devoting what he calls the “second half” of life (from age 60 to 120) to the betterment of the Earth and mankind.
Korean-born Lee has spent most of his life studying and teaching self-actualization, and his Body & Brain Yoga and Brain Education seminars have taken him around the world. His teachings, he says, are based on “Sundo, a traditional Korean system of mind-body training.” Now in his late 60s, Lee says that he has found a new purpose: he suggests that one can “decide” to live to be 100, or even 120. With this mindset, he asserts, one can face later stages of life with enthusiasm for how much can still be accomplished rather than with fear of old age: “the second half of life, more than any other time, is optimal for finding and realizing that [true] self.” His current project is Earth Village, a retreat that he founded in a region of the North Island of New Zealand. He describes it as “a residential school and community...where hundreds of people can experience a self-reliant, earth-friendly lifestyle in a place where humans and nature live in harmony.” In articulate, well-organized prose, Lee ebulliently shares his methods for overcoming life’s stumbling blocks, be they external or emotional. For example, here’s how he describes a meditation exercise to release the soul from weighty baggage that’s been collecting over the years: “Feel the ardent desire to become a free soul, and feel only that desire. Feel the earnest desire in your heart to soar freely in the heavens, like a bird.” His lifestyle and training methods for maintaining a healthy brain as one ages effectively focus on a critical element: hope, which he calls “Vitamin H.”
A joyful book that will appeal most to self-help enthusiasts, but some tips may resonate with a broader audience.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-935127-99-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Best Life Media
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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