A personal and inviting investigation of how to find real happiness.
A guide to finding joy in the here and now.
As this book opens, debut author and lawyer-turned–happiness coachMorrison gives readers a thumbnail sketch of her own life, which seems, on the surface, to have all the ingredients required for happiness: “I earned the grades, degrees, competitive positions, and dollars,” she writes. “I had the partner, the kids, the stable high-paying job, and the house—everything that, on paper, should have been enough.” However, she says, “I spent countless hours trying to figure out what else I needed to be happy.” She offers her insights on how she found her own joy in a book that, she hastens to add, is not one-size-fits-all but might be useful for many readers. The first of these insights governs the rest: a definition of what she calls priority-alignment living. “Do more of what matters most to you,” she writes, “and let go of the rest.” Happiness, she stresses, isn’t about taking hits and making compromises now in hopes of gaining greater contentment in some hypothetical future; rather, it’s about finding what one needs in each of the “seasons” that life presents. By this, she doesn’t mean “youth, middle age, and old age,” she says, but life phases with personalized definitions that take stock of what one is doing and what one can do to provide oneself with comfort. Morrison presents a clear series of mental exercises designed to help readers identify their goals and separate their anxieties from their passions; if one fails to do so, it can create what the author calls an “Emotional Energy Gap,” which she describes as “the biggest culprit of failed attempts, repeated start-and-stop loops, and procrastination.” In a series of smoothly executed chapters, she elucidates this and other similar concepts. Over the course of her book, her advice is plainspoken and experience-tested, and the latter quality gives the work an extra resonance. Her warm tone makes even familiar nostrums feel sincere, as when she writes, “In my experience, doing more of what doesn’t make you happy isn’t how you get happier.”
A personal and inviting investigation of how to find real happiness.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73677-300-0
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Untangle Happiness
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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