A Year of Living Kindly

Starred review from December 1, 2018
A year's worth of valuable insights about kindness.In 2015, Cameron (One Hill, Many Voices, 2011) dedicated a whole year to becoming a kinder person. The abundant lessons she learned comprise this book, and early on, she makes an important distinction between being kind and being nice: "Nice doesn't ask too much of us...holding the door, smiling at the cashier....[Kind] means thinking about the impact I'm having in an interaction with someone and endeavoring to make it rich and meaningful." She makes a convincing case for doing the latter, noting its benefits to physical health, mental health, and even business success. She then works her way through the many obstacles to being kind, including fear, time constraints, impatience, and resentment. Other sections examine how to react to unkind interactions, how to be kinder to oneself, and dozens of other related concepts. To conclude each chapter, the author writes a powerful "Kindness in Action" paragraph with reflective questions and clear invitations to help readers truly apply the book's principles. As a longtime blogger, Cameron knows how to captivate an audience; her prose is, by turns, humorous, astute, logical, eloquent, and sincere. There are no distracting tangents, and there's no meaningless "fluff" to fill space. Cameron is also genuinely open about her own weaknesses; for example, she writes that when she first committed to the idea of being kinder, she "all-too-quickly resumed my cranky ways, stopping and starting kindness like a sputtering engine." Cameron's anecdotes are consistently memorable, and her analysis of them is often brilliant. Overall, this well-organized book is engaging enough to read quickly but profound enough to savor slowly.A thorough, genuine, and highly effective self-help work.

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