Toni Raiten-D'Antonio

Closer to 2 stars, but I'll be generous because this book was clearly written by someone who believes many of the false premises of the modern world. The first 40 pages are the best part, the rest is too imbued with college-level pseudo-psychology stuff.

Some social shaming is good and necessary for a healthy society, and roles are necessary for a functional society. Of course everything you see on TV or in mass media is going to promote the opposite of both, so I find it ironic that she show more realizes how bad these influences are, and then takes some of their positions anyway.
"Anyone can be anything and everyone has value" are modernist concepts based on moral relativism that cannot stand up to scrutiny. Child rapists do not have value, and people in wheelchairs cannot be distance runners. The people in wheelchairs can do other things, as is an example in this book. But the child predators should be hung.

Pretending that heinous evil can only exist because people are denying their true self is a dangerous misunderstanding of the inherent evils of human nature.
"But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Ultimately though, I gave it 3 stars because the core message is a good one. There is a real you and a fake you, and the closer you get to your real potential, the better; in many cases. There are some real monsters in the world though, and everyone would be a monster without absolute morals to guide them. show less

I feel like I should premise this review with a quite note. I'm extremely intrigued by the notion of body image and how it affects people. After working around and directly with children for the last 14 years, I've seen the age at which children are struck by negative body image slide lower and lower. Due to this fact, I tend to devour any article that I find on the matter. Not until TLC Book Tours offered me a chance to review Ugly As Sin did I find a book that compiles it all so neatly and show more beautifully.

Toni Raiten-D'Antonio is both a psychotherapist and professor, and it shows in her work. The chapters are thoughtfully separated into sections that discuss the origins of "ugliphobia", how it relates to culture, what effects it creates, and how to overcome it. Her book is beautifully written, which I honestly find rare among non-fiction works. The accounts that she shares, the meaningful quotes that she puts in, it all comes together to create an extremely meaningful and fascinating account of how the concept of ugliness has evolved.

What I enjoyed most about reading Ugly As Sin was how much of herself Raiten-D'Antonio puts into her book. There are multiple accounts of her own personal experience with the body image battle, and she even goes so far as to share candid stories from her childhood. A book like this is sometimes hard to read because it tackles the truth so well. I found myself nodding at times, teary-eyed at others, and fuming over the whole issue at others. It is hard to face the fact that we built this world for ourselves, and trapped ourselves in our own individual prisons.

Ugly As Sin is, without a doubt, a book that I recommend to all women of all ages. Like I mentioned above, the age at which body image affects us as a society is slowly sliding lower and lower. I feel that if more women read this book, felt the empowerment, and took the steps to make themselves feel comfortable in their own skin, society as a whole would benefit from it! (Yes, that is my soapbox and I'm sticking to it.) I leave you with a quote from the book itself that I think will resonate with you, and I hope will encourage you to read this book. show less

Margery Williams wrote "The Velveteen Rabbit", published in 1922. Eighty-two years later, a guide to becoming real was published, written by a professional psychotherapist, and based on lessons gleaned from the nursery book.

If you have never read the "Velveteen Rabbit", give yourself the gift of reading it first, although the "Velveteen Principles" can be appreciated on its own merits. The first chapter is titled "To be Real in a world of Objects". Toni illustrates with story after story show more from her practice, that obtaining things as a life goal, is not a path to happiness, but a detour away from the goal of "being real". What she calls 'real' in her book is a process of being in touch with yourself and other people, using empathy, courage, honesty and other core values.

Toni writes concisely and passionately about the overwhelming demands from movies, television and magazines to adopt beauty, wealth, power and fame as the only yardstick of a successful life. She defends the need to instead live with gratitude and generosity, as a surer recipe for genuine contentment.

She calls on us to excavate our authentic emotions from under the cover of the socially acceptable responses demanded by false perfection. She doesn't advocate letting emotions rule our actions, she merely asks us to acknowledge our genuine feelings accurately. To get us started on the path to honesty with ourselves, she provides a list of emotions on page 72. When I saw that list, I knew I would be using it as a reference to fine-tune the characters in my novel. The list is arranged alphabetically from "abandoned" to "withdrawn".

I want the characters I write to be real, so Toni's book is a good place for them to start. There is more in the book on being real than I've covered in this review, and all of it is good food for thought, not only for my characters, but also for myself.

(My review was originally published at Forward Motion.) show less

Its been a long time since I've read The Velveteen Rabbit, but it was one of my favorite stories growing up, and it has always stuck with me.

I still picture the fire and the rabbit potentially having to be destroyed, but turns real.

So when I saw this at the Hershey Library I scooped it up. Its an interesting take on the 'self-help' genre and has a more psychological leaning (the author is a psychologist and therapist), so that made it more than just a skin-deep self help book.

There is show more definitely a lot of good principles and stories and ideas in this. Its a quick read too, and really captures the spirit and essence of The Velveteen Rabbit (book and character). show less