A rehash of the podcast that may interest established fans.
The hosts of a popular podcast series write about their experiences living by self-help books.
In each episode of the podcast By the Book, Brooklyn-based hosts Greenberg and Meinzer (So You Want To Start a Podcast, 2019) take listeners through the ups and downs of living by the prescriptive rules of their mutually assigned self-help books. The books represent a range of commercially relevant topics, from dieting to financial savings to the mystically aspirational. Within each two-week run, the hosts discuss possible insights gleaned as well as individual challenges, and they relate how their experiences may have affected their relationships with their spouses or friends. Humor is also important, hence the inclusion of occasional chestnuts such as Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus and Phyllis Diller’s Housekeeping Hints. In this book, the authors approximate the breezily chatty voice of their podcast, and they break it down into thematic sections: “13 Things That Worked,” “8 Things That Didn’t Work,” and “8 Things We Wish More Books Recommended.” The workable tasks included learning to declutter (Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up) and preparing for death (The Art of Dying Well). Among the books that didn’t work were dieting books and works stressing the need for forgiveness, such as The Four Agreements. Throughout, the authors offer subjective commentary, more often triggered by specific impulses rather than the quality of the work they’ve chosen to live by that week. In the final section, they expand beyond specific books and delve into more personal issues. Greenberg advocates for talk therapy and medication (in her case, for treating ADHD), and Meinzer, “a world-class procrastinator,” advises accomplishing goals by approaching them in chunks. Though both offer some valid advice, neither seems aware of the many notable books on these topics already available. For their avid listeners, there isn’t much in the way of new information or insights about the books or the hosts, and readers not familiar with the podcast don’t gain an understanding of why they approached this subject in the first place.
A rehash of the podcast that may interest established fans.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-295719-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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