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Book Review

How to Take the Grrrr Out of Anger
How to Take the Grrrr Out of Anger Anger is a part of life. We can’t avoid it, we shouldn’t stuff it, and we can’t make it go away. Kids need help learning how to manage their anger. This book speaks directly to kids and offers strategies they can start using immediately. Blending tips and ideas with jokes and funny cartoons, it guides kids to understand that anger is normal and can be expressed in many ways—some healthy, some not. It teaches them how to recognize anger in themselves and others, how to deal with situations and emotions (loneliness, guilt, frustration, fear) that lead to or mask anger, and how to deal with the anger they feel. Young readers learn that violence is not acceptable and there are better, safer ways to resolve conflicts. They also discover what to do when people around them are angry, how to get help, and how to locate other resources (books, hotlines, school groups) when they need more support.

Author: Elizabeth Verdick, Marjorie Lisovskis
Paperback:  112 pages
Company: Free Spirit Publishing  (2002-12)
ISBN: 1575421178
List Price: $8.95
Amazon Price: $4.61
Used Price: $5.14

Book Review

Making a Good Brain Great: The Amen Clinic Program for Achieving and Sustaining Optimal Mental Performance
Making a Good Brain Great: The Amen Clinic Program for Achieving and Sustaining Optimal Mental Performance Daniel Amen, M.D., one of the world’s foremost authorities on the brain, has news for you: your brain is involved in everything you do—learn to care for it properly, and you will be smarter, healthier, and happier in as little as 15 days!

You probably run, lift weights, or do yoga to keep your body in great shape; you put on sunscreen and lotions to protect your skin; but chances are you simply ignore your brain and trust it to do its job. People unknowingly endanger or injure their brains, stress them by working at a frenzied pace and not getting enough sleep, pollute them with caffeine, alcohol, and drugs, and deprive them of proper nutrients. Brain dysfunction is the number one reason people fail at school, work, and relationships. The brain is the organ of learning, working, and loving—the supercomputer that runs our lives. It’s very simple: when our brains work right, we work right—and when our brains have trouble, we have trouble in our lives.

Luckily, it’s never too late: the brain is capable of change, and when you care for it, the results are amazing. Making a Good Brain Great gives you the tools you need to optimize your brain power and enrich your health and your life in the process. The principles and exercises in this book, based on years of cutting-edge neuroscience research and the experiences of thousands of people, provide a wealth of practical information to teach you how to achieve the best brain possible. You will learn:

•how to eat right to think right

•how to protect your brain from injuries and toxic substances

•how to nourish your brain with vitamins and do mental workouts to keep it strong

•the critical component of physical exercise, and which kinds work best

•how to rid your brain of negative thoughts, counteract stress, and much more

Full of encouraging anecdotes from Dr. Amen’s many years of experience, Making a Good Brain Great is a positive and practical road map for enriching and improving your own greatest asset—your brain.

From the Hardcover edition.

Author: Daniel G. Md Amen
Paperback:  336 pages
Company: Three Rivers Press  (2006-12-26) (2006-12-26)
ISBN: 1400082099
List Price: $13.95
Amazon Price: $8.17
Used Price: $8.18

Book Review

The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment Ekhart Tolle’s message is simple: living in the now is the truest path to happiness and enlightenment. And while this message may not seem stunningly original or fresh, Tolle’s clear writing, supportive voice, and enthusiasm make this an excellent manual for anyone who’s ever wondered what exactly “living in the now” means. Foremost, Tolle is a world-class teacher, able to explain complicated concepts in concrete language. More importantly, within a chapter of reading this book, readers are already holding the world in a different container–more conscious of how thoughts and emotions get in the way of their ability to live in genuine peace and happiness.

Tolle packs a lot of information and inspirational ideas into The Power of Now. (Topics include the source of Chi, enlightened relationships, creative use of the mind, impermanence, and the cycle of life.) Thankfully, he’s added markers that symbolize “break time.” This is when readers should close the book and mull over what they just read. As a result, The Power of Now reads like the highly acclaimed A Course in Miracles–a spiritual guidebook that has the potential to inspire just as many study groups and change just as many lives for the better. –Gail Hudson

Author: Eckhart Tolle
Paperback:  224 pages
Company: New World Library  (2004-09-29)
ISBN: 1577314808
List Price: $14.00
Amazon Price: $6.95
Used Price: $6.50

How to Take the Grrrr Out of Anger
How to Take the Grrrr Out of Anger Anger is a part of life. We can’t avoid it, we shouldn’t stuff it, and we can’t make it go away. Kids need help learning how to manage their anger. This book speaks directly to kids and offers strategies they can start using immediately. Blending tips and ideas with jokes and funny cartoons, it guides kids to understand that anger is normal and can be expressed in many ways—some healthy, some not. It teaches them how to recognize anger in themselves and others, how to deal with situations and emotions (loneliness, guilt, frustration, fear) that lead to or mask anger, and how to deal with the anger they feel. Young readers learn that violence is not acceptable and there are better, safer ways to resolve conflicts. They also discover what to do when people around them are angry, how to get help, and how to locate other resources (books, hotlines, school groups) when they need more support.

Author: Elizabeth Verdick, Marjorie Lisovskis
Paperback:  112 pages
Company: Free Spirit Publishing  (2002-12)
ISBN: 1575421178
List Price: $8.95
Amazon Price: $4.61
Used Price: $5.17

Water for Elephants: A Novel
Water for Elephants: A Novel Jacob Jankowski says: “I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other.” At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn’t always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn’t a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn’t write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison.

Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob’s life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which he finds himself. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the “menagerie” and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can. August, the animal trainer, is a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose occasional flights into madness and brutality often have Jacob as their object. Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. He is the self-appointed Protector of the Downtrodden, and… he falls in love with Marlena, crazy August’s wife. Not his best idea.

The most interesting aspect of the book is all the circus lore that Gruen has so carefully researched. She has all the right vocabulary: grifters, roustabouts, workers, cooch tent, rubes, First of May, what the band plays when there’s trouble, Jamaican ginger paralysis, life on a circus train, set-up and take-down, being run out of town by the “revenooers” or the cops, and losing all your hooch. There is one glorious passage about Marlena and Rosie, the bull elephant, that truly evokes the magic a circus can create. It is easy to see Marlena’s and Rosie’s pink sequins under the Big Top and to imagine their perfect choreography as they perform unbelievable stunts. The crowd loves it–and so will the reader. The ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely. –Valerie Ryan

Author: Sara Gruen
Paperback:  350 pages
Company: Algonquin Books  (2007-04-09)
ISBN: 1565125606
List Price: $13.95
Amazon Price: $5.70
Used Price: $4.50

The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness
The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from  Chronic Unhappiness

The Mindful Way through Depression draws on the collective wisdom of four internationally renowned cognitive therapy and mindfulness experts, including bestselling author Jon Kabat-Zinn, to help you break the mental habits that can lead to despair. This authoritative, easy-to-use self-help program is based on methods clinically proven to reduce the recurrence of chronic unhappiness. Informative chapters reveal the hidden psychological mechanisms that cause depression and demonstrate powerful ways to strengthen your resilience in the face of life’s misfortunes. Kabat-Zinn lends his calm, familiar voice to the accompanying CD of guided meditations, making this a complete package for anyone looking to regain a sense of balance and contentment.

Author: J. Mark G. Williams, John D. Teasdale, Zindel V. Segal, Jon Kabat-Zinn
Paperback:  273 pages
Company: The Guilford Press  (2007-06-01)
ISBN: 1593851286
List Price: $19.95
Amazon Price: $12.28
Used Price: $12.29

Book Review

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior
Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior

A fascinating journey into the hidden psychological influences that derail our decision-making, Sway will change the way you think about the way you think.

Why is it so difficult to sell a plummeting stock or end a doomed relationship? Why do we listen to advice just because it came from someone “important”? Why are we more likely to fall in love when there’s danger involved? In Sway, renowned organizational thinker Ori Brafman and his brother, psychologist Rom Brafman, answer all these questions and more.

Drawing on cutting-edge research from the fields of social psychology, behavioral economics, and organizational behavior, Sway reveals dynamic forces that influence every aspect of our personal and business lives, including loss aversion (our tendency to go to great lengths to avoid perceived losses), the diagnosis bias (our inability to reevaluate our initial diagnosis of a person or situation), and the “chameleon effect” (our tendency to take on characteristics that have been arbitrarily assigned to us).

Sway introduces us to the Harvard Business School professor who got his students to pay $204 for a $20 bill, the head of airline safety whose disregard for his years of training led to the transformation of an entire industry, and the football coach who turned conventional strategy on its head to lead his team to victory. We also learn the curse of the NBA draft, discover why interviews are a terrible way to gauge future job performance, and go inside a session with the Supreme Court to see how the world’s most powerful justices avoid the dangers of group dynamics.

Every once in a while, a book comes along that not only challenges our views of the world but changes the way we think. In Sway, Ori and Rom Brafman not only uncover rational explanations for a wide variety of irrational behaviors but also point readers toward ways to avoid succumbing to their pull.

Author: Ori Brafman, Rom Brafman
Hardcover:  224 pages
Company: Doubleday Business  (2008-06-03) (2008-06-03)
ISBN: 0385524382
List Price: $21.95
Amazon Price: $10.45
Used Price: $10.70

Adrenal Fatigue: The 21st Century Stress Syndrome
Adrenal Fatigue: The 21st Century Stress Syndrome This is an incredibly informative and reader-friendly book about a common debilitating medical condition that goes largely undiagnosed and untreated. ADRENAL FATIGUE: The 21st Century Stress Syndrome is a very empowering work cram-packed with vital information about a condition that very likely affects millions of people.

Author: James L. Wilson
Paperback:  358 pages
Company: Smart Publications  (2002-01-25)
ISBN: 1890572152
List Price: $14.95
Amazon Price: $8.79
Used Price: $6.50

Making a Good Brain Great: The Amen Clinic Program for Achieving and Sustaining Optimal Mental Performance
Making a Good Brain Great: The Amen Clinic Program for Achieving and Sustaining Optimal Mental Performance Daniel Amen, M.D., one of the world’s foremost authorities on the brain, has news for you: your brain is involved in everything you do—learn to care for it properly, and you will be smarter, healthier, and happier in as little as 15 days!

You probably run, lift weights, or do yoga to keep your body in great shape; you put on sunscreen and lotions to protect your skin; but chances are you simply ignore your brain and trust it to do its job. People unknowingly endanger or injure their brains, stress them by working at a frenzied pace and not getting enough sleep, pollute them with caffeine, alcohol, and drugs, and deprive them of proper nutrients. Brain dysfunction is the number one reason people fail at school, work, and relationships. The brain is the organ of learning, working, and loving—the supercomputer that runs our lives. It’s very simple: when our brains work right, we work right—and when our brains have trouble, we have trouble in our lives.

Luckily, it’s never too late: the brain is capable of change, and when you care for it, the results are amazing. Making a Good Brain Great gives you the tools you need to optimize your brain power and enrich your health and your life in the process. The principles and exercises in this book, based on years of cutting-edge neuroscience research and the experiences of thousands of people, provide a wealth of practical information to teach you how to achieve the best brain possible. You will learn:

•how to eat right to think right

•how to protect your brain from injuries and toxic substances

•how to nourish your brain with vitamins and do mental workouts to keep it strong

•the critical component of physical exercise, and which kinds work best

•how to rid your brain of negative thoughts, counteract stress, and much more

Full of encouraging anecdotes from Dr. Amen’s many years of experience, Making a Good Brain Great is a positive and practical road map for enriching and improving your own greatest asset—your brain.

From the Hardcover edition.

Author: Daniel G. Md Amen
Paperback:  336 pages
Company: Three Rivers Press  (2006-12-26) (2006-12-26)
ISBN: 1400082099
List Price: $13.95
Amazon Price: $8.29
Used Price: $6.26

Book Review

New Moon (The Twilight Saga, Book 2)
New Moon (The Twilight Saga, Book 2) Legions of readers entranced by Twilight are hungry for more and they won’t be disappointed. In New Moon, Stephenie Meyer delivers another irresistible combination of romance and suspense with a supernatural twist. The “star-crossed” lovers theme continues as Bella and Edward find themselves facing new obstacles, including a devastating separation, the mysterious appearance of dangerous wolves roaming the forest in Forks, a terrifying threat of revenge from a female vampire and a deliciously sinister encounter with Italy’s reigning royal family of vampires, the Volturi. Passionate, riveting, and full of surprising twists and turns, this vampire love saga is well on its way to literary immortality.

Author: Stephenie Meyer
Hardcover:  608 pages
Company: Little, Brown Young Readers  (2006-08-21)
ISBN: 0316160199
List Price: $19.99
Amazon Price: $10.74
Used Price: $10.00