Review of The Nazi Hunters, by Neal Bascomb

Award Winners, Children's Nonfiction Review, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, Suspense, True Stories 0

The Nazi Hunters

How a Team of Spies and Survivors Captured the World’s Most Notorious Nazi

by Neal Bascomb

Arthur A. Levine Books (Scholastic), 2013. 242 pages.
Starred Review
2014 YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award Winner

Here’s a work of nonfiction that reads like a thriller. I didn’t realize until I read the note about the author at the back that this book was based on the author’s book for adults, Hunting Eichmann. It doesn’t read like an abridgement.

Because of the nature of the material, this is a book for teens and preteens, rather than children. But anyone who enjoys a good spy novel will enjoy this true-life tale.

The book sets the stage with what happened in World War II. It looks at the particular, focusing on the story of a young man, Zeev Sapir, in Hungary. Zeev later testified at Eichmann’s trial. The book explains the four phases of Eichmann’s plan: Isolate the Jews, secure Jewish wealth, move the Jews to ghettos, and finally, transport them to camps. His job was to get them to the camps, and he didn’t claim responsibility for what happened to them there.

The first chapter briefly explains Eichmann’s rise to power and his escape from Germany at the end of the war. The rest of the book focuses on how he was discovered in Argentina by Israeli Secret Service, and the elaborate plan they needed to be able to abduct him, bring him to Israel, and put him on trial.

I was struck by the sheer number of those involved who had lost family members in the Holocaust. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but the details as mentioned in this book brought it home to me.

I like the way the book explains the importance of the trial of Adolf Eichmann:

The Eichmann trial was almost more important in the field of education than in that of justice. David Ben-Gurion achieved his ambition: The trial educated the Israeli public, particularly the young, about the true nature of the Holocaust. And, after sixteen years of silence, it allowed survivors to openly share their experiences.

In the rest of the world, the intense media coverage and the wave of Eichmann biographies and fantastic accounts of his capture rooted the Holocaust in the collective cultural consciousness. The Shoah, as it was also known, was not to be forgotten, and an outpouring of survivor memoirs, scholarly works, plays, novels, documentaries, paintings, museum exhibits, and films followed in the wake of the trial and still continues today. This consciousness, in Israel and throughout the world, is the enduring legacy of the operation to capture Adolf Eichmann.

The book is full of photographs all along the way, including pictures of important documents, such as the captain’s logbook for the El Al flight out of Argentina and Eichmann’s Red Cross passport. This reminds the reader, all the way through, that these exciting events actually took place.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on an advance review copy I got at an ALA conference.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of The Plantagenets, by Dan Jones

Audiobooks, History, Nonfiction Review 0

The Plantagenets

The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones
read by Clive Chafer

Blackstone Audio, 2013. 21 hours on 17 CDs.

Thank you to Liz Burns for recommending this book on her A Chair, a Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy blog. I read her recommendation when I had recently learned that I have a few drops of Plantagenet blood in my veins – one of my distant ancestors was a distant descendant of an illegitimate child of King John, whom Dan Jones describes as the worst of the Plantagenet rulers.

I don’t think I could have read all this history in the print book. As it was, I skipped and listened to other things in between some of the CDs. So I know a whole lot more about British history than I ever did before, but it’s more of a grand overarching view than remembering all the details. And I confess I was far more interested in historical characters that I’d read about in historical novels than anyone else. Especially since I was interrupting my listening, I often got the different Henrys and Edwards confused, and wasn’t always sure exactly which king he was talking about.

I loved the narrator’s voice and British accent at first. However, he used the same “quoting” voice every time he was quoting someone. Not that they should be different – they were mostly quotes from historians or from various kings. But after awhile, it all sounded the same.

Still, I can’t think of a more painless way to get a grand overview of an era of British history (and some of my own ancestors!) than listening to this narrative on the way to and from work. I learned about the many wars, about revolutions and uprisings, about the establishment of laws, and about what was expected of a medieval king. And despite being history, it was never boring.

The blurb on the back says that Dan Jones is working on a new history of the War of the Roses. That’s the era that comes next, and I’m looking forward to finding out more.

BlackstoneAudio.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library audiobook from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Top Dog, by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman

Current Issues, Nonfiction Review, Science, Starred Review 0

Top Dog

The Science of Winning and Losing

by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman
read by Po Bronson

Hachette Audio, 2013. 9 hours on 8 CDs
Starred Review
2013 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #9 Nonfiction

I’ve enjoyed all of Po Bronson’s books that I’ve read, most recently NurtureShock, which was also written with Ashley Merryman. I’ve been accused of being too competitive, and I recently joined a weekly board game group, so I was thinking about competition when this book became available.

Po Bronson explores many different aspects of his topic, presenting studies done in any way related to competition. All of them are fascinating. Some of those things include how performance is affected by competition, what happens in our bodies when we compete, differences between men and women in competitions, family dynamics and competition (only children are less competitive — no surprise there!), what happens when teams are involved, and how we respond to winning and losing.

The part about the differences between men and women was especially interesting, except that I was annoyed that no data was given as to how prevalent these differences are. In other words, are all women as described, or just the majority? I’m curious if, as a competitive member of a large family, the qualities they attribute to women apply to me.

Since I listened to it, I can’t quote great bits. I found it interesting that some people do better when competing — and some people do worse. I love playing games, but many of my friends don’t enjoy it at all. This book helped me see that probably has a lot to do with our genes and our upbringing, and not something either of us is likely to change in a hurry.

In the section on teams, I thought it was interesting that teams do best not when everyone is equal, but when there are well-defined roles. I thought that related to recent plans to do away with some of the hierarchy at my workplace. It’s not necessarily a good idea.

If you’re at all interested in any type of competition, this book is sure to cover some aspect of that type. Fascinating stuff.

TwelveBooks.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library audiobook from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Children’s Book-a-Day Almanac, by Anita Silvey

Creativity, Nonfiction Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Children’s Book-a-Day Almanac

365 days of history, holidays, and events

365 great children’s books — one for every day of the year

by Anita Silvey

Roaring Brook Press, New York, 2012. 388 pages.
Starred Review
2013 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #5 Nonfiction

Children’s Book-a-Day Almanac is the print form of Anita Silvey’s wonderful blog, also called Children’s Book-a-Day Almanac. I’d been following the blog, so when I learned there was a print book, I made sure to get a copy, and have delved into it daily for all of 2013.

Anita Silvey’s knowledge of children’s books is vast. For each day of the year, she recommends a children’s book with some connection to that date, and gives you a taste of the book and why it is worth reading. As well, each day has a sidebar with facts about that day — children’s authors born that day, as well as other famous people, historic events, and holidays you might not have known about (like “I Love Horses Day” or “Smile Power Day”) — all with related book recommendations.

I was extra happy when I saw she’d listed one of my all-time favorite books, Anne of Green Gables, on my birthday, June 14.

The only catch? It would be hard to read all these books in a year. Now, I’ve read enough already, that I really should take it on as a project one year to read all the ones listed that I haven’t read before. And then the next year, I could try to read at least one of the additionally recommended books for each day, and on and on it could go.

One thing I’m sure of: I read many of the books listed here on Anita Silvey’s recommendation, and I was never disappointed. What you have here is a full year of great reading.

mackids.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own copy, purchased through Amazon.com.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? by Brian D. McLaren

Christian, Nonfiction Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?

Christian Identity in a Multi-faith World

by Brian D. McLaren

Jericho Books, New York, 2012. 276 pages.
Starred Review
2013 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #8 Nonfiction

This is an important book for Christians to read if they want to interact with today’s society. (If they want to just hide out apart from the world, then they shouldn’t bother.) I like the questions Brian McLaren poses, and I like the thoughtful and thought-provoking answers he gives.

At the beginning of the book, he talks about the identity problem Christians have:

Simply put, we Christians already know how to do two things very well. First, some of us know how to have a strong Christian identity that responds negatively toward other religions. The stronger our Christian commitment, the stronger our aversion or opposition to other religions. The stronger our Christian commitment, the more we emphasize our differences with other faiths and the more we frame those differences in terms of good/evil, right/wrong, and better/worse. We may be friendly to individuals of other religions, but our friendship always has a pretext: we want them to switch sides and be won over to our better way. We love them (or say that we do) in spite of their religious identity, hoping that they will see the light and abandon who they have been to find shelter under the tent of who we are.

Alternatively, others of us know how to have a more positive, accepting response to other religions. We never proselytize. We always show respect for other religions and their adherents. We always minimize differences and maximize commonalities. But we typically achieve coexistence by weakening our Christian identity. We make it matter less that they are Muslim or Hindu by making it matter less that we are Christian. We might even say that we love them in spite of our own religious identity.

For reasons that will become clear in the pages ahead, I’m convinced that neither of these responses is good enough for today’s world. So I will explore the possibility of a third option, a Christian identity that is both strong and kind. By strong I mean vigorous, vital, durable, motivating, faithful, attractive, and defining — an authentic Christian identity that matters. By kind I mean something far more robust than mere tolerance, political correctness, or coexistence: I mean benevolent, hospitable, accepting, interested, and loving, so that the stronger our Christian faith, the more goodwill we will feel and show toward those of other faiths, seeking to understand and appreciate their religion from their point of view. My pursuit, not just in this book but in my life, is a Christian identity that moves me toward people of other faiths in wholehearted love, not in spite of their non-Christian identity and not in spite of my own Christian identity, but because of my identity as a follower of God in the way of Jesus.

This book explores those ideas in detail, and lays out what a strong benevolent identity can mean for our doctrine and our liturgy and our sense of mission.

I read this book over a long period of time. (I kept having to turn it in because it had holds.) I think I’m going to buy myself a copy and read it over again, because there’s much in here that I want to absorb more fully.

This is well worth reading. And if you disagree, it would be worth analyzing why you disagree. How do you think Christians should interact with today’s multi-faith world?

brianmclaren.net
jerichobooks.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Runaway Husbands, by Vikki Stark

Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, Relationships, Starred Review 0

Runaway Husbands

The Abandoned Wife’s Guide to Recovery and Renewal

by Vikki Stark

Green Light Press, 2010. 192 pages.
Starred Review
2013 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #2 Nonfiction

It’s been eight years now since my husband left me, and I’ve been divorced for three years. When I heard about this book, I had to read it. I was happy to be reading it from a place of healing. But still, the words were so validating. So good to know I’m not alone in this experience. Even better, I was able to recommend the book to a friend in the thick of it, and she said she was sure God prompted me to recommend it to her at exactly that time. I don’t doubt it for a second.

When I was in the middle of my husband leaving, the book that helped me tremendously was The Script: The 100% Absolutely Predictable Things Men Do When They Cheat. That book looks at what goes through the man’s mind as he’s getting ready to leave and leaving. Runaway Husbands is even more therapeutic, because it tells you what you will go through when you are left.

Now, I’m reading it from the perspective of several years out, but I so recognize the stages.

The author’s husband left her when she came back from a book tour, a tour during which he’d consistently expressed his love to her. Here’s how she describes why she wrote this book:

I was measuring what I’d observed with clients against what I was experiencing in my own life, and I just didn’t get it. Most people assume that it’s impossible for a person to have an affair without the partner having some knowledge — that the injured spouse is always either complicit or purposefully blind. However, that was not my case. Under even the closest scrutiny, I was unable to discern any trace that could have tipped me off that things were not hunky-dory in the marriage. On the contrary, few wives could boast of a more devoted mate, and, oddly enough, until the revelation of his infidelity and subsequent heartless flight from the marriage, he was the ideal husband!

I just couldn’t wrap my mind around how a man who genuinely appeared so committed to our marriage could morph overnight into an angry stranger. In the midst of my suffering, I knew that there’d be no rest for me until I could figure it out. So as days stretched into weeks, I started researching wife abandonment. Through reading and speaking with other women, a remarkable picture slowly started to take shape; my husband’s bizarre behavior seemed to fit into a pattern exhibited by other men who suddenly bolted from apparently happy marriages and then turned against their wives. The similarities were uncanny! I defined this pattern and named it Wife Abandonment Syndrome.

She names eight ways that Wife Abandonment Syndrome is different from a typical divorce: Shock value, a sense of powerlessness, lack of closure, deception, reality is shaken, a redefined past, greater effect on children, and greater effect on friends. There’s a reason this shakes your world so drastically! This book helped me feel better about how long it’s taken me to recover.

I like her eight Transformational Stages of recovery, because I recognize them all. It would have been nice to have this when I was going through them! She aptly names them after weather patterns: Tsunami, Tornado, Thunderstorm, Ice Storm, Fog, Sun Shower, Early Spring, and Warm Summer Day.

And here are her Seven Steps for Moving Forward, which she elaborates on more fully in the main part of the book:

1. Recognize that the chaos won’t last forever (needed to resolve the Tsunami Stage).

2. Accept that the marriage is really over (needed to resolve the Tornado Stage).

3. Integrate the fact that your husband has changed irrevocably and is beyond caring for your welfare (needed to resolve the Thunderstorm Stage).

4. Understand why he needs to justify his actions any way possible — including rewriting history, lying or attacking you (needed to resolve the Ice Storm Stage).

5. Give up trying to get the acknowledgment and apology that you deserve (needed to resolve the Fog Stage).

6. Turn your focus from the past to the future (a step in both the Sun Shower and Early Spring Stages).

7. Celebrate your new life as a single person (Warm Summer Day Stage).

Besides guiding you through these steps, this book offers plenty of helpful advice and encouragement for coping. Best of all, perhaps, is knowing you are not alone.

runawayhusbands.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own copy, purchased via Amazon.com.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Good Prose, by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories, Writing 0

Good Prose

The Art of Nonfiction

Stories and advice from a lifetime of writing and editing

by Tracy Kidder & Richard Todd

Random House, New York, 2013. 195 pages.
Starred Review

Tracy Kidder writes good nonfiction. On Sonderbooks, I’ve reviewed Mountains Beyond Mountains and Strength in What Remains, and I read Among Schoolchildren long before I started writing Sonderbooks.

Good Prose is a book written by Tracy Kidder and his long-time editor, Richard Todd, about the writing process. It throws in the story of their collaboration and friendship along the way, but mostly it gives lots of insights about writing good prose.

It’s no surprise that the writing in this book is exceptionally good. So to review this book, I’m going to simply offer several example paragraphs.

Even the stories about their friendship are insightful. I like this bit from the Introduction:

A long association had begun. Todd knew only that he had a writer of boundless energy. For Kidder, to be allowed not just to rewrite but to rewrite ad infinitum was a privilege, preferable in every way to rejection slips. And as for Todd, it was possible to imagine that a writer willing to rewrite might turn out to be useful. Todd once remarked to a group of students, never expecting he would be quoted, “Kidder’s great strength is that he’s not afraid of writing badly.” The truth was that Kidder was afraid of writing badly in public, but not in front of Todd. Kidder would give him pieces of unfinished drafts. He would even read Todd passages of unfinished drafts, uninvited, over the phone. Very soon Todd understood when he was being asked for reassurance, not criticism, and would say, “It’s fine. Keep going.” When a draft was done, Todd would point out “some problems,” and another rewrite would begin.

That ritual established itself early on and persisted through many articles and Kidder’s first two books. A time came — midway through the writing of Among Schoolchildren, about a fifth-grade teacher — when Kidder began revising pages before Todd had a chance to read them. This was a means of delaying criticism forever. No doubt that was Kidder’s goal, and he could remain happily unaware of it as long as he kept on rewriting. Things went on that way for a while, until Todd said, in the most serious tone he could muster, “Kidder, if you rewrite this book again before I have time to read it, I’m not working on it anymore.” Kidder restrained himself, and the former routine was reestablished.

Here are some tidbits from a section on Characters:

Some general truths apply. For instance, one sure way to lose the reader is trying to get down everything you know about a person. What the imaginative reader wants is telling details. Characters can emerge in long descriptive passages, as in Tolstoy, but brevity can also work. Graham Greene rarely gives us more than a detail or two — a face “charred with a three days’ beard” or a pair of “bald pink knees” — and Jane Austen often gives us less than that, and yet the people those writers create have come alive for generations of readers.

Whether it is brief or lengthy, mere description won’t vivify a statue. What we want are essences, woven into a story in moments large and small. A character has a wart. You could describe it in detail, but the reader would probably see it more clearly if you described not the wart but how the character covers it when he’s nervous.

Here’s a paragraph from the chapter on essays:

When you write about your own ideas, you put yourself in a place that can feel less legitimate than the ground occupied by reporters or even by memoirists, who are, or ought to be, authorities on their subjects. An all-purpose term describes efforts at sharing your mind: the essay. As an essayist you can sometimes feel like a public speaker who must build his own stage and lectern. Essays are self-authorizing. This is the dilemma but also the pleasure of the form. The chances are that nobody asked for your opinion. But if your idea is fresh, it will surprise even someone, perhaps an assigning editor, who did ask.

And from the chapter on style:

We think of an author’s style as if it were some sort of fixed identity, but it is made up of an accumulation of granular decisions like this one. I remember once in those early days giving Kidder some advice about style. I said in effect, “Look, you are not always the calmest and most reasonable person in the room, and there is no need to be. But you admire such people. Why don’t you just pretend to be a reasonable man in your prose?” I think it was useful advice, actually, but it’s not as if a style is a one-time discovery. It is created and re-created sentence by sentence, choice by choice.

And finally, here’s how they sum up the book, again from the Introduction:

Good Prose is mainly a practical book, the product of years of experiment in three types of prose: writing about the world, writing about ideas, and writing about the self. To put this another way, this book is a product of our attempts to write and to edit narratives, essays, and memoirs. We presume to offer advice, even the occasional rule, remembering that our pronouncements are things we didn’t always know but learned by attempting to solve problems in prose. For us, these things learned are in themselves the story of a collaboration and a friendship.

The result is a book both instructive and entertaining.

tracykidder.com
AtRandom.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Fire in the Ashes, by Jonathan Kozol

Current Issues, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories 0

Fire in the Ashes

Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America

by Jonathan Kozol

Crown Publishers, New York, 2012. 354 pages.
Starred Review

This book is made up of stories — stories about some of the poorest children in America, but children whom Jonathan Kozol has known and cared about for twenty-five years. So we get to see them rise into adulthood. Some of them do not go on to productive lives, but most of them do, and the readers rejoice with Jonathan.

He begins the book with a note to the Reader, which begins like this:

Over the course of many years I have been talking with a group of children in one of the poorest urban neighborhoods of the United States and have written several books about them and their families. Readers ask me frequently today if I’ve kept in contact with the children and if I know how many have prevailed against the obstacles they faced and, in those cases, how they managed to survive and how they kept their spirits strong amidst the tough conditions that surrounded them.

It has not been difficult to keep in contact with most of these children because so many of them, as they have grown older, have come to be among my closest friends. They call me on the phone. They send me texts and e-mails. We get together with each other when we can.

The stories that follow are stories of particular children. But these stories put faces to poverty. They make us care. I can’t think of a better way to raise concern for problems in urban America than to get us to care about the children and families growing up there.

Sometimes life is more astonishing than fiction, and more inspiring, too. Even if you don’t want your awareness of issues raised, this book is worth reading for the stories alone. You will care about the wonderful people he features and follows into adulthood.

JonathanKozol.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Living and Loving After Betrayal, by Steven Stosny

Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, Relationships, Starred Review 0

Living and Loving After Betrayal

How to Heal from Emotional Abuse, Deceit, Infidelity, and Chronic Resentment

by Steven Stosny, PhD

New Harbinger Publications, Oakland, CA, 2013. 235 pages.
Starred Review

Steven Stosny’s books helped me tremendously after my husband left me, particularly You Don’t Have to Take It Any More, which was retitled Love Without Hurt. I also went to his Compassion Power Boot Camp after I moved to Virginia, and it helped tremendously in my healing.

However, those materials were designed to help someone when in the middle of an abusive relationship. Now that my divorce is final, I have no more contact with my ex-husband.

So I was delighted when I heard about Steven Stosny’s latest book, Living and Loving After Betrayal. It uses his powerful approach of self-compassion to help you heal after betrayal and be ready to love again — whether getting back together with your spouse or someone else.

Now, I’ve come a long way since my husband left me. But these are wonderful reminders of how to stay healthy. Just this morning, I woke up from a dream about my ex-husband that made me feel rejected all over again. I turned to Steven Stosny’s methods, reminding myself of my core value, and didn’t get sunk in feeling bad all day.

What’s more, if I ever dare to get in a new relationship, I am glad to have this wise advice about avoiding a potential betrayer, and learning to trust again. And reading this also makes me less afraid to start a new relationship.

As with his other books, the crux of Steven Stosny’s healing techniques is self-compassion, and focusing on your own core value.

He doesn’t focus on what happened, but more on how to heal. However, he does understand that betrayal is hard to overcome.

Whether it crashes upon you in revelation or seeps into consciousness via delayed realization, intimate betrayal snatches the floor of personal security from under you. Most of my clients describe the initial aftermath of revelation and realization as a kind of free fall, with no bottom in sight. Shock and disbelief are punctuated by waves of cruel self-doubt:

Was I attractive enough, smart enough, successful enough, interesting enough, present, attentive, caring, patient, or sacrificing enough?

He shows you how to use your emotional pain to help yourself to heal, improve, repair and grow.

Self-compassion is a sympathetic response to your hurt, distress, or vulnerability, with a motivation to heal, repair, and improve. It brings a sense of empowerment — a feeling that you can do something to make your life better, even if you are not sure what that might be at the moment. It tends to keep you focused on solutions in the present and future.

Self-criticism is blaming yourself for your hurt, distress, or vulnerability, usually with a measure of punishment or contempt. It’s based on the mistaken idea that if you punish yourself enough you won’t make similar mistakes in the future, when just the opposite is true — self-punishment leads to more mistakes. (Who is more likely to make more mistakes, the valued self or the devalued self?) Self-pity is focus on your pain or damage with no motivation to heal, repair, or improve. It has an element of contempt for your perceived incompetence or inadequacy because it assumes that you can’t do anything to make your life better. Needless to say, self-criticism and self-pity turn pain into suffering.

One of the problems after betrayal involves post-traumatic stress and obsessive thoughts. This book shows you how to recondition your brain with restorative images whenever painful thoughts surface. I was able to use those techniques this morning after waking up from a dream about my ex-husband. They work!

Steven Stosny explains that the key to healing and growth is your core value.

Core value grows out of the uniquely human drive to create value — to make people, things, and ideas important enough to appreciate, nurture, and protect. Consistently acting on the drive to create value provides a sense of meaning and purpose in life. This chapter and the next will help develop your core value as a general means of healing and growth. Although a highly developed core value won’t make you forget your betrayal, it will definitely make all that you have suffered less important in your life as a whole. The past can no longer control us, once it is overshadowed by the deeply human drive to create value and give our lives meaning.

He finishes the book with tips about getting into a relationship again, whether with your betrayer or someone new. Here’s hoping I will have a reason to look at those tips again! Reading this book made that idea seem much less impossible. Here’s to healing!

Steven Stosny’s blog, Anger in the Age of Entitlement
compassionpower.com
newharbinger.com

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Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Pursuing the Good Life, by Christopher Peterson

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, Starred Review 0

Pursuing the Good Life

100 Reflections on Positive Psychology

by Christopher Peterson

Oxford University Press, 2013. 341 pages.
Starred Review

I’m rather fascinated by Positive Psychology. I’ve read books like How We Choose to Be Happy, You Can Be Happy No Matter What, and What Happy Women Know: How New Findings in Positive Psychology Can Change Women’s Lives for the Better, and enjoyed all of them.

Christopher Peterson was one of the founders of the field of Positive Psychology. This book is a set of 100 short pieces taken from his Psychology Today blog called “The Good Life“. I approached the book by reading one piece per day for the last few months. (I had to turn the book back in a few times, too!) The pieces were fascinating, or at least amusing, and often helpful.

Here’s a paragraph from Dr. Peterson’s first chapter:

My goals for the reflections that follow are several. First, I will discuss research findings about the psychological good life. Second, I will explore the most promising practical applications based on these findings. And third, I will use positive psychology as a vantage to make sense of the world in which we live. I hope you find what I say interesting.

Indeed, you might not expect to find a book written by an academic to be entertaining and practical at the same time, but this one is both of those things.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.