A moving testament to the power of unconditional love and its ability to get us through our darkest hours.
In her debut memoir, Konrad eloquently captures the complexities of her relationship with a larger-than-life sister whose towering presence—both literally and figuratively—molded the family in ways big and small.
Konrad, the baby of the family, was Willie and Rosie Smith’s third daughter, nine years younger than her mercurial sister, middle child Sandra. Her earliest memories are of Sandra’s doing things like throwing a fit after every shampoo. In hindsight, Sandra’s seesawing mood swings and “talent for manipulation” should have served as warning flags of trouble ahead. But the Smith girls, despite being African-Americans in the Jim Crow South of the 1940s, were brought up in Houston, Texas, by doting parents whose unconditional love glazed over glaring faults. As Sandra came of age, her bold and domineering personality smothered everyone around her, including the Smiths’ oldest daughter, Jackie. “I really didn’t have much of a social life and much of my time was dominated by concern for my sister,” Konrad remembers. “The agony that comes when a sibling acts out impacts everyone. In my case, I was particularly vulnerable as Mama always managed to draw me into it—up close and personal.” Overweight as a child, with problems of her own, Konrad was regularly roped in to mediate issues she did not yet fully grasp, the pawn between Sandra and her mother, Rosie. The memoir brilliantly captures the complexities of growing up in the shadow of a domineering figure whose grip on attention meant less room for everyone else to blossom. Konrad movingly chronicles Sandra’s steady downhill descent from star high school student to member of Houston’s underworld. Only when a devastating tragedy grounded Sandra did she remarkably turn her life around, with help from her long-suffering family and devoted husband, Charles. Eventually, Konrad served as caregiver to both her aging parents and to Sandra, whose life, with its highs and lows, Konrad believes, was filled with blessings of motivation and grace.
A moving testament to the power of unconditional love and its ability to get us through our darkest hours.Pub Date: June 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5049-1565-6
Page Count: 216
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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