A handbook that may benefit anyone seeking consolation after a loved one’s death.
Hewett follows up her previous publications (Good Words, 2011, etc.) with a guide that offers constructive ways to deal with grief.
After a funeral is over, how do survivors handle mourning in a culture that urges them to “get over it?” People feel uncomfortable with death, Hewett says, because, in part, it “reminds us of our own mortality, an uncomfortable truth.” Her personal experience after a series of losses in her own family inspired her to become a certified grief counselor. In this book, she provides generously varied approaches to living with the death of a loved one, reflecting her belief that grief is a process that connects body, mind and spirit. The book’s three parts discuss grief’s power, how to prepare for a loved one’s death, and practical activities, including suggested readings such as Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), making mourning blankets and albums, keeping a journal, writing letters to the deceased, or getting a pet. The book is designed to provide an array of constructive, creative ways for mourners to spend their time as they move toward adjustment and reconciliation. Although some material overlaps with Hewett’s previous books (including a condensed version of how to write a eulogy), she also brings fresh ideas to her topics, and it’s a particularly useful supplement her previous book. It’s not likely to be picked up for light reading, given the popular avoidance of death that Hewett discusses, but it seems a natural for hospital, hospice and public libraries. What’s most appealing about it is the author’s reluctance to suggest one “right” way to grieve or mourn, in favor of offering several practices, so that readers may select the ones most compatible with their own beliefs and lifestyles.
A handbook that may benefit anyone seeking consolation after a loved one’s death.Pub Date: June 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1490838090
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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