A touching memoir of dealing with two losses.
A memoir of a father, his family and their collective battle with his daughter’s cancer.
Schwartz is a father, husband and attorney experiencing spiritual galut, a Hebrew word meaning the search to gain understanding of one’s existence. His faith was tested when his 26-year-old daughter was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. A former production assistant on the CBS TV show How I Met Your Mother, Amy had found her dream career as a preschool teacher. Schwartz and his wife, Joanne, accompanied Amy to every appointment and test. As Amy’s health deteriorated, so did her mother’s. While being a caregiver for her daughter in her time of need, Joanne died one night of a heart attack. Schwartz was devastated, as was Amy, but they tried not to lose hope and instead continued with Amy’s treatments and medications. Eventually, Amy chose home hospice care, and the nurses told Schwartz her body was transitioning toward death. Even with Amy’s passing, Schwartz astoundingly kept his faith and followed the Jewish tradition of shiva, a weeklong mourning period after the dead are buried. The beginning chapters of Schwartz’s memoir recount the family’s history and their journey through galut, with an essaylike level of detail that’s compelling although separate in some ways from the heart of the story. The book then moves to his daughter’s battle with cancer, a story both heartbreaking and powerful. Though Schwartz’s poetry interspersed throughout the book doesn’t add much, a poignant excerpt from Amy’s diary about her time as an intern on MTV’s New Tom Green Show as the “gum girl”—she collected the audience’s gum in a jar, since chewing it was not allowed—showcases the optimistic person Amy was. An absorbing read, the heartrending memoir portrays the family’s tragic but compelling story without sentimentality but with Schwartz’s ample love for his family and a wish to help others.
A touching memoir of dealing with two losses.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484900352
Page Count: 224
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2013
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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