“Overall, I think this is a good book. It offers good advice for ways to reduce stress in our lives and to help us see that indeed, "it is all small stuff" because we often, to resort to a cliché, "make mountains out of mole hills".
I think that some of the strategies offered are so simple they should be obvious, but I suppose the point of writing a book for an audience of overly stressed people in an overly stressed world is that often things that should be obvious really aren't.
As I was reading the book, I did find that the more I got into the book, the more repetitive I thought it got. This is a very easy read with short chapters of typically no more than 1 - 2 pages each. And while those short chapters are probably great for our modern world where people seem to have the attention span of a nanosecond some days (Okay, that's a slight exaggeration on my part.), I think it's the short chapters that began to make it seem repetitive.
Carlson would mention a concept such as "turn your melodrama into a mellow-drama" in one chapter and then he would revisit that concept a couple of chapters later. Some concepts he revisited 3-4 times within the book. And while each chapter does focus on a specific strategy, I found myself withing that he had at least taken each strategy that related to a concept and grouped the chapters dealing with those particular strategy closer together in the book. Even better would perhaps have been combining some of the chapters as they addressed the same concept (i.e Each strategy for turning your melodrama into a mellow-drama could have been included in one chapter instead of three or four chapters.)”
Jaede wrote this review Sunday, July 27 2008.
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