book reviews – Page 11 – REACHING HURTING WOMEN MINISTRIES

PLAY::

How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul

Stuart Brown, MD

Earlier this year I reviewed Brene’ Brown’s book Daring Greatly in which I first learned of Stuart Brown and the National Institute for Play. Having my own challenges with finding play time I decided that PLAY was an important book for me to read.

In PLAY, Dr. Brown takes us to all sides of play, from the animal kingdom through the human lifecycle, play time in infancy to school yard rough and tumble, through adolescence on into adulthood. We learn through Dr. Brown’s research the incredible importance play is to the prevention of violence in our world and spawning innovation in the marketplace.Most interesting to me was to learn that the opposite of play is not work, but depression. Which makes total sense if you think about it.

When you read PLAY you will discover your play personality, how to take your own play history and hopefully learn how to be free to play more. I found this book quite interesting. It’s a little heavy on the research for my personal taste, but all in all I recommend PLAY by Dr. Stuart Brown.

If you can’t see the video screen below CLICK HERE for Dr. Stuart Brown’s fascinating TED talk.

Unglued: Making Wise Choice in the Midst of Raw Emotions

@LysaTerKeurst

This past September I was blessed to see Lysa TerKeurst speak at the Women of Faith conference in Dallas. When she spoke at the conference her message was taken from Unglued, so I was excited that I had already chosen it for my October Book Review.

Are you a woman who struggles with stuffing your emotions or exploding from over-stuffing? Then you are going to want this book! To be honest most of us are one or the other and sometimes both depending on the hour of the day or the day of the month.

Our schedules are overly committed which keeps us in danger of bursting at our seams with raw emotions daily. In Unglued Lysa shares transparent personal stories to help us recognize the differences between stuffing our emotions and exploding. She then gently teaches us from Scripture how to repair our thought processes and reactions which can help prevent future explosive episodes.

Though I don’t struggle with raw emotions much these days, there were many years when I was a walking time bomb. I could have really used Unglued when I was raising my three children!