Occasionally inspiring but fatally uneven.
The Today show fourth hour co-anchor and Dateline NBC correspondent offers encouragement to those who are unfulfilled with their lives to break through the "gray clouds of frustration and worry" and "create a life that’s both fun and rewarding."
In her third book, Kotb (Ten Years Later: Six People Who Faced Adversity and Transformed Their Lives, 2014, etc.) recounts her interviews with men and women who honored their life's callings despite formidable obstacles. She shuns an overly flattering tone and relates her stories in a plain, straightforward style (unfortunately, several passages read like dry Wikipedia entries). The author comprehensively details her subjects’ life events and accomplishments. After an introduction (each story “will identify the guideposts that led to a place of peace and fulfillment”), the author begins with a deeply moving account of a girl's triumph over poverty and a fractured family life to her acceptance to Harvard Medical School, a journey that showcased her superhuman resilience and resourcefulness. Another, about a socialite couple who sponsored a nonprofit foundation in Haiti to place orphans with adoptive parents, is Kotb's best example of two dissatisfied people who conquered great trepidation and found their passion by surprise. Some chapters start strong—e.g., the heiress-turned–sustainable living advocate, and the Wall Street one-percenter–turned-minister—but then get bogged down by their length. By contrast, the celebrity profiles—including Touched by an Angel star Roma Downey and boxer Laila Ali—are far too brief and inconsequential. Oddly, Kotb's profile of comedian and activist Margaret Cho doesn't feature any of her jokes or trademark candor. This brief, gift-style book contains some gems, but others are seemingly thrown together and make readers impatient for the payoff.
Occasionally inspiring but fatally uneven.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5242-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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