A compassionate, practical, and useful series of approaches for dealing with pet loss.
A debut guide focuses on healing after the loss of a beloved pet.
Despite the fact that tens of millions of Americans own at least one pet, the reaction of a great many people to the loss of a furry friend is one of dismissal: “It was only a dog” or “Just get another one.” In her book, Farage-Smith expresses gentle frustration with such condescension. “Our society needs to recognize and honor this type of loss,” she writes, “because it can be so devastating and it affects so many people.” The author—an educator, mental health counselor, and founder of the Rochester Center for Pet Grief and Loss—describes the myriad faces of this kind of loss and outlines strategies and mindsets that may help readers get through it. She goes over the long history of the human-pet bond, recounting the many documented physical and psychological benefits of the relationship. Then she moves to the bulk of her book and its strongest sections, in which she dissects different kinds of grief. They range from the “anticipatory” kind that can arise when people are caring for an older or terminally ill pet to the “ambiguous” or “disenfranchised” type, when, for instance, an owner is forced to part ways with an animal companion and must experience grief without death. The classic stages of that grief are likewise examined, and throughout the guide, Farage-Smith deftly employs the warm, compassionate prose tone that readers enduring this type of loss will most appreciate. Among other things, she strongly advocates journaling to work out the intense feelings involved, but she always positions herself as the audience’s biggest champion. “The process of forgiving yourself can begin by accepting what happened, learning and growing from the experience, and allowing yourself to move forward,” she writes. “Forgiveness is a choice.” Readers who have experienced the trauma of pet loss will deeply appreciate the valuable wisdom in these pages.
A compassionate, practical, and useful series of approaches for dealing with pet loss.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781647426767
Page Count: 224
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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