Book Reviews

Four Ways to Click: Rewire Your Brain for Stronger, More Rewarding Relationships is a self-help book designed to illustrate, via a strongly neuroscience-based framework, the nature of reader’s personal relationships. The goal of the book is, ostensibly, to identify the reader’s strong and weak relationships through included evaluations and map out actions that can improve them. The explicit goal is to change the way readers’ brains are wired through interventions that target four specific brain regions as outlined in the book’s “C.A.R.E. Plan.”

Twenty-four years have passed since my first shamanic journey. When I received Carl Greer’s book, Change Your Story, Change Your Life: Using Shamanic and Jungian Tools to Achieve Personal Transformation, I thought I knew what I’d find in the pages of his text. I was not prepared for the depth of detail—both written by Carl and expected from me, the reader, embarking on a journey of self-transformation.

Turow begins her book by introducing mindfulness. Turow thoroughly goes over each aspect of mindfulness, explaining everything from its core concepts to the proper time and setting for practices. Included is ‘Resolving misconceptions and overcoming stumbling blocks’ to encourage further practice and ability, but perhaps the most significant portions of this chapter are the parts of “Special Considerations for Practicing Mindfulness After Trauma” and “Choosing a Specific Practice.” The parts begin a trend that moves throughout the book, encouraging careful and safe practice for survivors especially and consideration that not all practices work for everyone; indeed, she has her reader explore specially for themselves, rather than a prescribed program.

Kelly’s passion is writing. He’s a clinical psychologist, a husband, father, family member and friend. His time was wrapped around responsibility and at the end of the day, writing lacked priority. But words came to him and eventually he started blogging. He shares his “writing” story –his first blog, the move to a smaller town giving his wife space to do what she loved and he space to write . . . his passion and his purpose, his art and his voice, his grace on the page: “The book was what fanned the embers of spark within me, but there was not time to write it” (163). So, they made time. And his words reach audiences in amazing ways.

Sue Gerhardt’s book aims to reconcile the growing disparity between public and professional knowledge of the new developments in cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, as well as social developmental, and personality psychology that pertain to early infant development and beyond.

Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat, for Binge Eating: A Mindful Eating Program for Healing Your Relationship With Food and Your Body is designed to assist readers in altering their eating habits. As the title implies, the author incorporates mindfulness exercises for readers to practice at their own pace to increase their self-awareness of appetite and compulsive eating habits.

We have all experienced stress; in some form it is a survival tool that gives us energy and fuel to handle a pressing situation. Sometimes a stressful situation is so overwhelming that we will do anything to avoid that situation for the rest of our life. In these cases, our security system will code everything in that situation into a script that will trigger a stress response as soon as anything reminds us of it. That stress response will grow stronger as our system generalizes it, to the point where we can generate a full life-or-death panic response by simply thinking about it. It is then called post-traumatic stress.

Reflecting on their place in the world and how that world effects them, these women set the tone for each contributor by sharing raw, honest, and impassioned presentations of self. Editors Caldwell and Leighton begin the book with an aptly named preface “Who We Are and Why We’re Here,” discussing their experiences in life and the embodied oppressions they have taken on by simply existing as themselves.

Linda Graham’s 2018 book, Resilience: Powerful Practices for Bouncing Back from Disappointment, Difficulty, and Even Disaster, is a continuation of the practices she first wrote about in her book, Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being. Throughout each chapter, Graham details exercises aimed to build and strengthen resilience by way of regular practice. Graham divides the book into eight chapters that are designed to guide the reader through a journey of understanding and strengthening resilience.

One simple sentence says it all: “Great sex is a mind-set, not a skill-set.” Maci Daye embodies the essence of her new book, Passion & Presence: A Couple’s Guide to Awakened Intimacy and Mindful Sex, in this short statement. Yes, readers receive exercises to practice concepts presented throughout the book, but the crux of success resides in mindfulness including presence, curiosity, and authenticity, and a commitment to one’s self, one’s partner and the relationship.