Dwight’s wholesome love for his family and friends, and the life lessons they’ve offered, makes for an engaging account of...
In this inspirational memoir, Dwight transforms everyday lessons into essential wisdom.
Dwight, an inspirational public speaker and life coach, compiled this memoir from 50 mini essays, but it’s really a book of tiny epiphanies. Through intimate interactions with family and friends—he’s twice married and the father of three teenage daughters—Dwight experienced deeply significant life lessons that belied their simplicity. His disarming sincerity and gentle humor serve to smooth the ordinary friction of relationship-building. In one particularly illuminating essay, Dwight relates his suggestion to his daughters that they ignore their personal electronics for a weekend to experience how tech-free time could enhance their face-to-face social interactions. Dwight puts himself to the same test—he discovers, somewhat surprisingly, that he had forgotten the value of direct human contact beyond the glowing rectangles that now possess our lives. That lesson resonates in his description of his church’s mission to the Dominican Republic, where he marvels at the simple joy experienced by people in material poverty but with psychological and spiritual contentment. In this midlife perspective, Dwight pays tribute to all the people who inspired him, especially his second wife. The closing portion of the book is a hymn of praise for his spouse—he proudly details the upward trajectory of her military career that culminated in her appointment as a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy. His pride assumes added gravitas since, as a former Marine, he recognizes the formidable challenges inherent to military service. While written in a highly readable style aimed at a mass audience—references to popular films abound—readers may be surprised by the frequent steps out of Dwight’s chronology. People and events scramble through Dwight’s narrative, which could leave readers lost and in need of a simple timeline of his life. Yet that complaint fades if the book is considered not a conventional memoir, but a random set of inspiring, character-building moments.
Dwight’s wholesome love for his family and friends, and the life lessons they’ve offered, makes for an engaging account of one man’s life well lived.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2011
ISBN: 978-0983941804
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Tagral
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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