Penguins Not Included

After spending the last month or so banging on about my own book and trying to cajole, persuade, harangue and generally pester anybody and everybody into buying it I’m now going to recommend somebody else’s. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still go and buy mine because we both know you should if you haven’t done already so, just that maybe you could read 2 books one after the other. The book I am going to suggest may well be wittier, more informative and more compassionate than mine, but I’m sad to say it has almost zero run on sentences, so it’s not all good.

 

I hope that brilliant intro now has you whipped up into literary feeding frenzy not seen since Saldam Rushdie inadvertently agreed to do a book signing in the Tehran branch of Barnes & Noble.

 

“So what is this book?” you ask whilst gently frothing at the mouth “And more importantly, what’s it about?”

 

It’s a book on NLP and therapy!

 

Don’t groan at me! This isn’t just any book on NLP and therapy, it’s a brilliant book on NLP and therapy, a groundbreaking book and a really great read to boot, and anyway, at least it’s not on life coaching. Most books on NLP tend to be a tad dry and aimed squarely at the NLP Practitioner rather than for mass consumption. There are exceptions of course, most notably some work by Richard Bandler, but on the whole unless you actually want to learn NLP then the great books on the subject are not going to have you rolling around the floor laughing like a hyena on nitrous oxide.

 

The Rainbow Machine by Andrew Austin makes a refreshing change. I have to say that a basic knowledge of NLP will certainly help you enjoy it ,but it’s not an absolutely necessity and anyway a 30 minute scour of the Internet would reveal enough material to allow you to understand some of the phrases he uses. As a somewhat unorthodox NLP Practitioner and therapist, Andy Austin relays some of the more amusing, harrowing and down right interesting encounters that he has had. I hate reviewing books critically because I’m lazy and anyway to me it’s much more simple than that. The key questions are this:

 

Is it amusing – Yes
It is well written – Yes
Is it informative and informed – Yes
Does it demonstrate compassion – Yes
Is it a page-turner – Yes
Is it accessible – Yes
Does it get you to think differently – Yes
Has it got pictures of cute penguins – No

 

So if points 1-7 are important and you can live without 8, go and buy it. If you need 8 as well then go and buy Happy Feet.

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