A straightforward and memorable manual about discovering strength through seven virtuous steps.
In this debut guide to a purposeful life, a martial arts teacher weaves her autobiography into lessons about finding inner power.
Kim is no stranger to hardship. She was born in 1946 in a small South Korean village (“We were surrounded by mountains and rivers. There was no electricity and there were no phones”). Growing up during the Korean War, she faced abandonment, abuse, violence, loss, and negative reinforcement from a young age. Determined to practice martial arts, she continued to defy those around her who attempted to suppress her learning the sport. Heading into her teen years and young adulthood, Kim managed to find sympathetic teachers and mentors who would nurture her skills, ultimately leading her to a lifelong career as a martial arts instructor. Through the striking story of her triumphs and the vital lessons she learned along the way, Kim deftly lays out crucial ideas to help readers establish a potent inner self that can overcome all forms of adversity. Beginning with self-knowledge, she clearly illustrates the advantages of forming and controlling your own thoughts in line with your objectives. One trait the author encourages is a willingness to reveal and accept one’s own flaws and hindrances in order to overcome them. While the lucid book’s suggestions are simple in theory, many of them are difficult in practice—such as finally admitting faults and indulging in honest self-reflection. The guide also examines useful topics like yin and yang, emphasizing that the authentic self is a balance of both masculine and feminine forces, though many individuals are afraid to express the qualities of both genders. From these larger concepts, the author presents and skillfully dissects the seven steps toward locating the real self: “body and mind as one, with truth, purity, love, loyalty, sacrifice, and patience.” Assessing the last phase, the author notes: “Finally, we develop patience with ourselves and others. We learn to be content with the path we have chosen and with our progress. We stop living for tomorrow and live and breathe the journey right now, weathering life’s surprises and disappointments, remaining at peace with our direction and with ourselves.” Through all of these principles, Kim asserts, individuals become focused warriors on the road to inner power, shelving distractions and channeling energy from practices that support their goals and happiness.
A straightforward and memorable manual about discovering strength through seven virtuous steps.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9994282-0-7
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Mountain Tiger Press
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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