Book Reviews

Open With...

By Dr Julie Smith

In this essential guide, Dr Julie Smith teaches her millions of readers and followers how to navigate life’s toughest moments while they are happening, rather than after the fact. What if we can learn to harness our emotions and stay present so we can process and choose how to respond to a situation? Picking up where Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? left off, Dr Julie shares research-backed concepts and powerful skills we can use to weather our most vulnerable moments. Learn how to move through any situation with grace, including:

• When it’s hard to be with yourself: facing vulnerability alone, dealing with your inner critic and handling imposter syndrome.

• When it’s hard to be with other people: dealing with betrayal and knowing what to do when you (or your parents) got it wrong.

• When it’s hard to be with your feelings: coping with loneliness, fear and hopelessness.

• When you’re healing from the past: getting out of a trauma response and learning how to stop ruminating about old events.

• When you’re looking to the future: preventing making the same mistakes, tackling uncertainty and finding your path.

Open When… teaches each of us to find and listen to the positive voice within when we need it most, and to care for our future selves and our mental health.

Do Hard Things

By Steve Magness

Toughness has long been held as the key to overcoming a challenge and achieving greatness, whether it is on the sports field, in a boardroom or at the dining room table. Yet, the prevailing model has promoted a mentality based on fear, false bravado and hiding any sign of weakness. In other words, the old model of toughness has failed us.

Steve Magness, a performance scientist who coaches Olympic athletes, rebuilds our broken model of resilience with one grounded in the latest science and psychology. In Do Hard Things, Magness teaches us how we can work with our body – how experiencing discomfort, leaning in, paying attention and creating the space to take thoughtful action can be the true indications of cultivating inner strength. He offers four core pillars to cultivate such resilience:

Pillar 1: Ditch the Façade, Embrace Reality

Pillar 2: Listen to Your Body

Pillar 3: Respond, Instead of React

Pillar 4: Transcend Discomfort

Through his knowledge and wisdom, Magness flips the script on what it means to be resilient. Drawing from mindfulness, military case studies, sports psychology, neuroscience, psychology and philosophy, he provides a roadmap for navigating life’s challenges and achieving high performance that makes us happier, more successful and, ultimately, better people.

Disobedient

By Elizabeth Fremantle

A jewel-bright place of change, with sumptuous new palaces and lavish wealth on display. A city where women are seen but not heard.

Artemisia Gentileschi dreams of becoming a great artist. Motherless, she grows up among a family of painters – all men and boys. She knows she is more talented than her brothers, but she cannot choose her own future. She wants to experience the world, but she belongs to her father and will belong to a husband. As Artemisia patiently goes from lesson to lesson, perfecting her craft, she also paints in private, recreating the women who inspire her, away from her father’s eyes.

Until a mysterious tutor enters her life… Tassi is a dashing figure, handsome and worldly, and for a moment he represents everything that a life of freedom might offer. But then the unthinkable happens. In the eyes of her family, Artemisia should accept her fate. In the eyes of the law, she is the villain. But Artemisia is a survivor. And this is her story to tell.

Lives of the Stoics

By Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

Instant New York Times Bestseller

“In story after page-turning story, Lives of the Stoics brings ancient philosophers to life.” – David Epstein, bestselling author of Range

“Wonderful.” – Chris Bosh, two-time NBA Champion.

For millennia, Stoicism has been the ancient philosophy that attracts those who seek greatness, from athletes to politicians and everyone in between. And no wonder: its embrace of self-mastery, virtue and indifference to that which we cannot control has much to offer those grappling with today’s chaotic world. But who were the Stoics? In this book, Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman offer a fresh approach to understanding Stoicism through the lives of the people who practiced it – from Cicero to Zeno, Cato to Seneca, Diogenes to Marcus Aurelius. Through short biographies of all the famous and lesser-known Stoics, this book will show what it means to live stoically and reveal the lessons to be learned from their struggles and successes. The result is a treasure trove of insights for anyone in search of living a good life.

Elmarie Kotze