A review by jcschildbach
First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety by Sarah Wilson

4.0

This seemed like quite a long book for something that is laid out mostly in very short sections. Then again, I was reading it on my Kindle at bedtime, so that might have colored how much I got through at any given time, and how long it took me to get through it. There was a lot of good stuff in here about different anxiety-management techniques and ideas, what the author has found helpful for herself, and plenty of quotes and concepts from various authors, philosophies, religions, schools of thought, etc. It was not particularly clinical, although there was a fair amount about various clinical studies. There was plenty of material from the author's own life, which is definitely not like that of just an average person with a workaday job (I had never heard of Wilson outside of this book, which was referenced in something else I read). And maybe I missed something in all those pages, but I was a little shocked when Wilson casually mentioned at the very end, among other relatively random pieces of information, that during the two years she was writing this book, she'd made two suicide attempts. That kind of threw me off, in the sense that if this is about how to live with anxiety, trying to kill oneself while working on a project of this sort and then not specifically addressing that in the book is a bit odd. But, like I said, maybe I missed something. Overall, though, I think it is helpful in understanding anxiety on a personal level for those who do not suffer from it, and helpful in finding ways to think about anxiety and deal with it for those who do.