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Tag: human nature

SNQ: Irvin D. Yalom’s “The Gift of Therapy”

Summary: Irvin D. Yalom’s The Gift of Therapy is a guidebook written for people entering the psychotherapy profession. The text’s many concise and enlightening chapters cover a range of topics that unveil Yalom’s therapeutic theory and practice, focusing on his experiences with individual therapy, group therapy, and existential therapy.  Written with tremendous spirit, deep compassion, and candid […]

Review: David Whyte’s “Consolations”

Consolations are words, strung together utterances, that explore experience but allow the essential mystery of existence to remain hidden. They come to us, through air, through ink, offering an embrace just comforting enough to help us bear the painful and frightful realization that we are alone, so starkly alone, that the words dancing through our […]

Review: Alice Munro’s “Selected Stories”

Having now read more than 1,000 pages of Alice’s Munro’s prose, it is clear to me that she is a once-in-a-generation kind of talent. This woman appears to produce beautiful phrases with the readiness and ease with which average humans produce carbon dioxide. Her fictional examinations of the human condition are simultaneously plainspoken and impenetrable; […]

Review: Rodd Wagner and James K. Harter’s “12: The Elements of Great Managing”

Less than a year and a half ago, I had absolutely no business experience. Today, I am part of the management team for a small but steadily growing business in the town where I grew up and hope to live for the rest of my life. This has been the most unexpected and dynamic development […]

Review: Ilona Andrews’s “Magic Binds”

Ilona Andrews’s Magic Binds is the perfect predecessor to the book Kate Daniels fans have been waiting for since the beginning. It’s also a terrific ride in its own right. Just like all the others, Magic Binds retains the core cast of characters and conflicts Kate Daniels fans love, while also breaking new ground. In this book, Kate’s […]

Quotes 12-7-2015

“Who can possibly save all the people of the world? Tengo thought. You could bring all the gods of the world into one place, and still they couldn’t abolish nuclear weapons or eradicate terrorism. They couldn’t end the drought in Africa or bring John Lennon back to life. Far from it––the gods would just break […]

Quotes 11-2-2015

“Seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only […]

Quotes 9-9-2015

“The idea that we would spend the holiday talking about anything as potentially explosive as my arrest was a fiction, and we all knew this even as I was being made to promise to do so. My parents persisted in pretending we were a close-knit family, a family who enjoyed a good heart-to-heart, a family […]

Quotes 9-7-2015

“There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace––those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote […]