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
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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