Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.

Reading this book is like being cornered at a cocktail party by someone who's self-absorbed and not-overly-bright, while they explain psychology by massively oversharing their own experiences.

This gets two stars from me because it does have a few lessons about cognitive behavioral therapy that could help a reader who is totally unfamiliar with that approach. However, there are manymanymany better resources on the subject (I'm putting a couple links at the end of this review).

Maybe Brown's style will work for some people, but she came off rather unprofessional and self-centered to me. For every useful sentence about human psychology, there are paragraphs of personal anecdotes from Brown's own life. There are also quite a few name-drops and sales pitches related to her coaching business.

I also found it off-putting that she starts off by explicitly rejecting the scientific method, calling her approach “qualitative research” or something. Basically that means she cobbled together preexisting ideas from philosophy and actual science, did a bunch of interviews, and pulled common threads to write about. And of course instead of citations, she has famous quotations - everything from Walt Whitman to the movie Gremlins (?).

Overall, this comes off feeling really padded and contrived to me. My advice is skip the tome and look up a summary if you're interested.

https://psychcentral.com/lib/15-common-cognitive-distortions/
https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/cbt-cognitive-behavioral-therapy-techniques-worksheets/