A manual that should be highly therapeutic for the fearful and anxious.
A guide provides practical tactics for facing up to fear.
Australian physician Sedhoff has written a self-help book that goes far beyond the terror associated with Covid-19. This eminently readable text addresses fear in the larger sense, offering an authoritative overview of the subject as well as a programmatic way to “resolve” one’s apprehensions. Part 1 begins with an illuminating introduction to the ways in which fear affects the brain specifically and individuals in general. The author then dives into a seven-stage process designed to reduce the “fear burden.” Each of these stages contains numerous, clearly identified actions to take, such as four mindfulness skills, four “methods to create structure and routine,” and three steps to overcome social anxieties. One of the more intriguing chapters in the first part of the book concerns how the media can heighten various forms of fear. Part 2 takes a more novel approach: Here, Sedhoff suggests strategies for turning the “fear monster to friend.” The author characterizes the fear monster as “ ‘a balloon monster’…that looks real on the outside, but get inside it and we find it is full of hot air.” Using this imagery helps to amusingly but dramatically undermine the frightening aspects of fear and leads into a 10-step method for overcoming any type of anxiety. What Sedhoff does next is ingenious: After summarizing the guide in a chapter that acts as a “mini-workbook,” he illustrates in discrete chapters how the 10-step method applies to taming the fear of severe illness, death, Covid-19, and PTSD—the last included “because PTSD and the fear it elicits are so extreme, but also because it can be challenging to navigate out of.” In the final chapter the author concludes: “Unless we walk with fear and talk to it regularly, it can lead us down dangerous paths that we may not know we are taking until it is too late.” Sedhoff’s voice throughout the volume is compassionate, calming, and reassuring. The numerous, diverse examples of scared patients helped by the author add richness to the work and credibility to his methodology.
A manual that should be highly therapeutic for the fearful and anxious.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2022
ISBN: 9780994609144
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Senraan Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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