Heartfelt testimony of an arduous search for self-affirmation that will appeal to fellow seekers.
A candid chronicle of determined self-transformation.
In 2011, one month before she turned 49, Price (Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography, 1999, etc.) realized, not for the first time, that she was miserable. Although she was a successful designer, living in Santa Fe with a woman she loved, she felt burdened by a “colossal workload and industrial-strength work ethic” that left her stressed and anxious. Desperately unhappy, she decided to leave behind her career and relationship to embark on a journey of self-discovery. As the author recounts her spiritual quest, she discovers that the only time she felt joy was when she traveled around the world talking with fans of her late father, the actor Vincent Price, and giving inspirational talks. “I felt the joy of adventure, new encounters, meaningful connections,” she writes. But that joy eluded her in everyday life. Reading inspirational books and attending a “transformational speaking workshop” taught her that she could generate joy through practice and sharing. Besides giving talks, she conveyed her message of joy through a blog that helped her to create “a community of fellow joy practitioners.” Much of this memoir focuses on Price’s parents, as she looks back to her childhood to examine the deep roots of her fears and self-doubt. She adored her doting father, whom she—and others—remembers as loving, generous, and joyful. However, her relationship with her exacting, demanding mother was far different. Her mother took every opportunity to demean her only child and make her feel unworthy and untalented. “I learned my fear of being not good enough from my mother,” she admits. When Price told her mother that she was a lesbian, her mother’s horrified response resulted in a three-year estrangement. Discovering the religious perspective of interspirituality proved to be decisive in Price’s growth and healing, and she offers a five-step process to help others “release qualities that may once have served us but no longer do.”
Heartfelt testimony of an arduous search for self-affirmation that will appeal to fellow seekers.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-486-81605-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ixia Press/Dover Publications
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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