Face Your Fear: Living with Courage in an Age of Caution - Hardcover

The Rabbi of Oxford for fourteen years, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the internationally bestselling author of fourteen books. He is currently the host of two radio shows: The Peter and Shmuley Morning Show, which reaches an estimated 250,000 listeners in the New York area, and a nationally syndicated discussion/call-in show on the Talk America Network on weekdays for three hours. Rabbi Shmuley is a weekly columnist for the Jerusalem Post (500,000 readers bi-weekly) and appears regularly in the op-ed pages of The New York Post (590,000 readers) and the Times of London (1 million readers).

He has been profiled in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The LA Times, The Chicago Tribune, etc. He is a regular guest on American talk and news programs.

Boteach's newest book reads like a film that stretches two hours but could have been wrapped up in 30 minutes. All fear, he posits, is a "toxic emotion" rooted in the "fear that you don't matter." In Part I, "The Case Against Fear," he draws on innumerable anecdotes from his work as a rabbi and counselor, but his generalizations are backed by little proof. ("No woman ever fears breast cancer," he writes. "Rather she fears her inability to deal with it.") To help readers eradicate fear from their lives, he presents 32 practical strategies in Part II that include dedicating your life to something higher, becoming a leader, "killing" your television, reconnecting with family, doing good, raising fearless children and building community. Each chapter begins with a biblical citation, but it is only in Part II that Boteach draws out that religious content. Boteach's approach veers from personal friend to questioning therapist to exhortative observer of American life, with an occasional shot of humor. The book's value lies in his insistence that fear is something entirely within readers' control, a choice that he correctly calls "immensely liberating."
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