by Rob Davis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 9, 2018
A successful guide that uses anecdotes to reveal powerful truths about life.
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In this debut self-help book, the author employs narratives about friends, family, and former associates to show the way thoughts and perspectives shape readers’ experiences.
Through short narratives describing the paths of different people he met along the way, Davis illustrates his imperatives for meditative, conscious, and positive living. Through stories about friends who learned from their mistakes and others who could not escape their own prisons of thinking, the author gives readers not just points or principles to ponder, but real human experiences that demonstrate them. For example, in one passage, Davis tells the tale of his teenage daughter, who, when allowed to make her own choices, realized she was in over her head and risked a loss of control. The story demonstrates both the potency of autonomy as well as the importance of finding the courage to ask for help, change one’s mind, and self-regulate. In another anecdote, the author deftly describes a woman he admired for being so energetic, upbeat, and seemingly content. Yet, to his shock, when his friend attempted suicide, Davis learned that outward cheer is not as simple as it might seem. The tales, while not all culminating in happy endings, effectively prove one point: Humans are the authors of their own stories, and only through self-reflection and accountability do individuals gain strength from experience. Through witnessing and sharing the personal plights of his friends, family, co-workers, and bosses, Davis skillfully provides surrogates for some of life’s hardest lessons, from humility to heartache to joy. The book ends with a compelling section of optimistic statements that can embolden readers if utilized as reflections or affirmations. A stable, positive, nonpreachy, objective voice makes the manual stand apart from others in the genre.
A successful guide that uses anecdotes to reveal powerful truths about life.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73256-650-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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Pulitzer Prize Finalist
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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