New Book Review: Rise

Title: Rise

Author: Daniel Kennedy

Date: 2026

Quote: "Rise: How to Turn Adversity into Your Greatest Strength explores how grit, resilience, and our relationship with pain shape success."

Some of us choose to, and some of us are forced to, take Marcus Aurelius's approach to life. There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Grab Life by the throat and force it to yield whatever you want it to yield. Acknowledge no difficulties. Marcus Aurelius was not a Christian so I used to wonder why he was so insanely popular at that church college I attended in the 1980s. Well, the 1980s were an era when the genre of books by therapists telling their clients to overpower their neuroses was insanely popular, generally. More than that, though: telling people to pull the power out of themselves to overcome all obstacles is a cheap, easy, feel-good way to tell them you can't be bothered to help. 

I did not expect anyone to be able to help me through the grief process, when I was at that school. (Not that people didn't invite themselves to try, because "helping" classmates was something they could feel good about doing, and if you were a numbed-out extrovert and moved fast enough you could delude yourself that you'd helped people whenever you parroted the last piece of advice you'd heard, though if you did not move fast enough you'd hear a lot of uncharitable words.) I did report a few problems like burnt-out light bulbs and dripping taps to people who were responsible for doing something about them, and get some misguided advice about How to Be Strong.

Daniel Kennedy is all in favor of the rising generation Being Strong. There are a few things about Being Strong he doesn't tell them, though. When people choose to push themselves to exercise in order to be more successful athletes, study in order to earn top grades, or take cold showers in order to be comfortable in cold weather, the side effects can include arrogance about their own fortitude. When they're forced to push themselves through hardships for no special benefit for themselves, just to recover "normalcy," permanent loss of empathy is to be expected. 

You can't chastise, e.g., me for making fun of somebody who couldn't live on $1000 per month with the sort of squeals of disapproval I've heard from welfare enablers. The only way people can feel any pity for anyone who can't live on $1000 per month is for those people to have never in their lives even had to imagine living on less than $2000 per month. Once we've learned that it's possible to live on less, sorry, welfare pushers, there's no going back. Though you could try a simple bribe of $10,000 per month to stop me writing about it.

It gets much worse than that. I was able to Be Strong because I inherited the gene. My Drill Sergeant Dad, the big strong polio survivor, had buried somewhere in his psyche the ability to want to be loved by children and dogs, appreciate pretty tinkly songs like "Love Is Like a Butterfly," and want his children to be kind and sensitive. He had pretty well destroyed the ability to teach those qualities by example. After forcing themselves to rebuild nerves and muscles destroyed by polio, survivors needed to do a lot of thinking about why yelling at children ("Put your feet on the pedals! Turn the pedals! Hold the handlebars!") is not the most effective way to teach them to ride bicycles, and about what polio survivors wanted to do, instead, in order to be fit for much of anybody to be around.

The world is so full of books about how to Be Strong, and how to tell other people to Be Strong when you're being paid to replace their light bulbs and should be doing that...but I've never seen a book that helped people recover the compassion we have systematically destroyed in ourselves. Admittedly some of the people whining for slack, or getting together in the break room to form a consensus that everyone hates the more efficient co-worker, deserve a good emotional spanking. The trouble is keeping them from scuttling away when someone like Hillary Rodham Clinton or Elon Musk enters a room (even on a screen). They scuttle and spew hate when it'd be good for their souls to be locked in the room and forced to write essays about why they are inferior to those people. Meanwhile those of us who have, not necessarily through any real fault of our own, Become Strong, could benefit from some help to turn down our energy levels to a point that allows us to know how much physical therapy a patient can take, or be able to teach children to read. 

That's not what Kennedy has to offer. This is a refreshingly frank book, more in the tone of a drill sergeant than in the tone of a psychotherapist. It says more and goes further than older self-help books presumed to do. Kennedy goes into details and advises people to build discipline by taking cold showers, unplugging their computers and flatphones, taking morning walks on the sort of days when coaches usually tell us that three good morning walks are all we really need in one week. Pursuing that sort of pain prepares us for the pain of working with a demanding boss. If you are a slacker and would like to succeed on a job with a demanding boss, this book may help you to help yourself in that direction, but it has nothing at all to offer to those of us who have already gone too far.

Toward the end of this book Kennedy, whose writing style is terse because it summarizes the contents of a few hundred self-help books from the 1970s and 1980s, does present a graphic outline of a continuum between the miserable slob who never even exercises, the person who chooses to let discipline build a good character, and the person who has been forced to Be Strong at the cost of all empathy...but he doesn't discuss whether the person who has Become Strong can recover from that. 

He might have done better to stick to discussing the intentional disciplines people use to build muscles and character. So much less emotional damage is done by that kind of "overcoming adversity." 

He might, also, have had more to say to the slackers who just hate the people who have Become Strong. Over the weekend someone steered me past the web site of Angela Stanton-King (https://www.auntieangieshouse.com/about). Here was a pro-lifer doing it right--not sitting around in a luxurious house, scolding women who didn't feel able to afford babies, but giving birth under horrible circumstances, telling those who are interested what she'd done, and helping other women find a slightly less horrible way to give birth to babies they may not be able to keep but don't want to abort. I like what I saw...except from the inevitable whine that Auntie Angie was making abortion survivors feel bad. Hello? This was on X. On X this year, the D moles trying to make Rs look bad were especially in need of whacking. They'd pop up on irrelevant discussions wherever women or women's issues were mentioned and screech about how abortion survivors had "killed more babies" than male murderers had killed living people. And this person found time to whine at Auntie Angie? Yes. That's the way wimps are. They don't turn to face the people who actually have been, and are, bullying them. They project their emotions onto people who are quietly trying to help--and/or showing them up. It's not the irresponsible boyfriend or the subcultures that expect premarital sex in open-ended "relationships" or the woman-haters on X who were making this miserable little cow feel bad. It's the beautiful shining role model. Well, somebody ought to be saying something to those who hate a person who has Been Strong. This is a good role for the psychotherapist, whose language is likely to be less heated than other people's.  

But if you are a Millennial who found it hard enough to get a minimum-wage job (yes, older people, it is hard these days) and now finds it hard to live on the minimum wage, this book can help you. You are going to have to Be Strong--just a little bit. You may benefit from some guidance and encouragement while you, too, discover that beans taste fine, and a board under a quilt is more soothing to the spine at night than a featherbed is, and when you eat the right food you can carry more than the professional baggage handler can easily lift.

Then, have a good time finding anyone to remind you that intentionally lugging in luggage the professional baggage handler will find hard to lift is not promoting girl power or displaying the benefits of the right diet. There are other ways to accomplish those things. Risking the baggage handler's ability to keep his overburdened body fit to do his job is just plain uncharitable.