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sillyduckie's review against another edition
Overly simplistic and not very original. It reads like an annotated review of books and experiments the author has found interesting, supplemented by violent anecdotes.
The author was raised in apartheid South Africa which she brushes off. Her anecdotes about South Africa, thus far, are largely not hers and are violent rapes. I'm not sure why a psychologist would so carelessly publish anecdotes about her friends' rapes and sum it up as a "we all go through hard things". She also casually mentions police brutality in the case of an officer who was so focused on catching a suspect he ran past a colleague being violently assaulted and didn't notice.
Some of the experiments she talks about seem unnecessarily cruel such as the professor who marks all his students' essays as the worst essay he's ever read, telling them that the essays were marked by other students, in order to access their thoughts and feelings on the matter.
I've listened to an hour and a half of this book. I don't think I will get anything out of finishing it, other than more reasons to think that the world is a terrible place and everything is pointless.
Some of the experiments she talks about seem unnecessarily cruel such as the professor who marks all his students' essays as the worst essay he's ever read, telling them that the essays were marked by other students, in order to access their thoughts and feelings on the matter.
I've listened to an hour and a half of this book. I don't think I will get anything out of finishing it, other than more reasons to think that the world is a terrible place and everything is pointless.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Emotional abuse, Grief, Sexism, Sexual violence, Death of parent, Death, Racism, Sexual assault, Colonisation, Misogyny, Police brutality, and Rape
daaan's review
4.0
The ideas contained within Emotional Agility are spot on, there's some really good things to take away from it and if I was rating it on ideas alone, I'd put this as a 5. The only issue is presentation. Certain sections get very buzzwordy and for a book that had a lot of practical ideas, it didn't have a practical way to scan and reread to get a quick sense of what you'd read. The structure didn't really help here. Still, this has a lot of good stuff, and I'm going to look for other resources to see if they can help bring the lessons back into daily living.
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