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
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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
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