Sage advice delivered in an energetic style.
Lawson (Dreamers and Doers, 2017, etc.) offers a straightforward self-help guide that aims to provide readers with the necessary tools to achieve greatness.
What do you need to fulfill your dreams and reach your potential? In this book, the author provides a host of principles that he says can help: a clear vision for your life, an optimistic attitude, the ability to truly focus and break free of self-imposed limits, and resilience in the face of adversity. He covers these concepts and others in highly focused, concise chapters that weave together advice with stories and inspirational quotes designed to evoke contemplation. There are also 14 original poems throughout the book that often address the chapter topics. For example, one stanza of a poem on leadership reads, “Leadership inspires, / And it manages to show / A path designed with purpose / and a plan for all to grow.” Lawson often offers bold statements, frequently emphasizing the need to act and warning readers to distance themselves from pessimists. He’s also not shy about including Christian themes, although they’re generally handled subtly. He stresses the importance of not only improving your own life, but also of helping others along the way. This book’s finest feature is its enthusiasm, which is never overbearing; the author seems legitimately joyful, as if he’s already reaped the benefits of his own advice. As for the poems, their typical, repetitive meter and rhyme schemes make them a bit mundane, but they still complement Lawson’s messages. The book lacks some popular features of other self-help books, such as concrete action steps and questions for reflection, so some readers may have difficulty putting Lawson’s advice into action. But overall, the content is persuasive and insightful.
Sage advice delivered in an energetic style.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-8905-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2018
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
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
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