A wise companion for life’s challenges.
Guidance for personal growth.
Perry, a British psychotherapist, advice columnist, and author of The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, draws on her experiences with patients and letter-writers to offer guidance about developing self-awareness to help navigate trials and difficulties. “What I hope this book will do,” she writes, “is help you understand your own early adaptations and belief systems, and be more aware of where they are serving you and where they may need updating.” Recognizing the myriad issues that individuals face, she organizes the book into four sections: how we love, how we argue, how we change, and how we find contentment, which she defines as “being satisfied with your life.” Each chapter includes letters from troubled men and women, which elicit her analyses of behaviors and views that undermine well-being. Overall, she emphasizes understanding and empathy, rather than blame and resentment. “If you look at others’ actions in a positive rather than a negative light,” she counsels, “you can get different meanings from them.” She encourages speaking “in ‘I’ statements, which define your own experience, and not ‘You’ statements, which are a judgment on the other person.” Throughout the book, she punctuates explanations with pithy nuggets she calls “Everyday wisdom.” One example: “If you have to choose between guilt and resentment, choose guilt. You will discover that your world does not fall apart.” Among the issues she discusses are disappointment in love and marriage; frustrations with jobs; isolation and loneliness; stress and anxiety; silencing one’s inner critic; and dealing with loss, grief, and aging. She examines three ways of coping with adversity—thinking, feeling, and doing—and she encourages readers to try to understand another’s perspective, rather than impose their own. In relationships, “to surrender to another person is a risk and an act of love. Surrendering means losing your ego, letting go of controlling behavior, and having faith that what will be, will be.”
A wise companion for life’s challenges.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780306834868
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Hachette Go
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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
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