An unconventional and ultimately uplifting call to reclaim your own life story.
A debut guide advocates self-improvement through autobiographical exercises.
Wade presents to her readers what she labels the Essential Life Story Method of transforming how they view their pasts and reshaping how they live in the future. The ELS Method, she asserts, will allow you to open “a window into your soul.” Going through that window “will uncover the blueprint of your own psychology and change that blueprint in ways that will immediately improve how you think, feel, and behave.” The ELS Method revolves around a deceptively simple core exercise: writing a brief (only five pages to start) autobiographical sketch. Take a pen, some paper, a private space, and then ponder and write your life story, at first in broad outline and then in increasing detail. In clear and very encouraging prose, Wade notes a handful of “best practices,” including write first by hand and transcribe to a computer later, read each chapter twice, and get feedback. These practices are intended to guide ELS participants as they expand their autobiographical drafts. Those expansions are likewise delineated, step by step, portion by portion. Readers are given a helpful series of writing prompts like: “What positive qualities, habits, and/or patterns do you admire in your mom? Which of these could you benefit from emulating more strongly?” The personal drift of such upbeat questions points to the ELS Method’s inner purpose, which is to use autobiographical exercises to take control of your own personal narrative. “The energy of your story radiates outward,” Wade writes, “producing a field around you that attracts everything that matches your story’s frequency and repels everything that doesn’t—good or bad.” The author deftly emphasizes that although ELS participants can’t change the past, they can reframe it—and that this can all happen through the power of storytelling. It’s a basic and thrilling claim, one that will cause readers at all stages of writing expertise to seriously consider putting their own stories down on paper.
An unconventional and ultimately uplifting call to reclaim your own life story.Pub Date: March 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9708809-0-1
Page Count: 220
Publisher: TEA HOUSE PRESS
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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