A soulful exploration of the way humans love and how they cope with death.
A handbook seeks to help readers survive loss and grow as a result.
The latest nonfiction work from Green (Generation Reinvention, 2010, etc.) centers on an alarming reality for baby boomers: the prevalence of personal loss in their lives. The author alerts readers at the outset that he has lost many important people in his life—grandparents, aunts, uncles, and most tellingly his sister—and these deaths have motivated him to write a book addressing some of the essential questions surrounding the whole experience. Is there value in suffering? Can it make someone stronger? Is there more to existence than the life humans see on Earth? What are the virtues of showing mercy, even to those who seem not to warrant it? What changes occur when a person endures a major loss? What steps can readers take to prepare their own loved ones for their inevitable deaths? This last question is echoed throughout the volume by Green’s frequent invocations of Randy Pausch’s 2008 bestseller, The Last Lecture, in which that author makes exactly this kind of life summation for his children to consult after his death. Green’s work sensitively elaborates on the larger questions raised by Pausch’s book, using end-of-chapter discussion questions to help readers examine their own behavior at key moments. “Each of us is likely to confront at some point in our lives the choice to be merciful or not,” Green writes at one point, following it up with the question: “When you have punished someone in the past, how could the outcome and consequences have been improved through mercy?” These questions, as well as his many citations of modern motivational and spiritual authors, give this guide a very inviting conversational feel, a sense that Green is helping rather than merely lecturing. His reminders to readers to remember their blessings especially when times seem darkest will likely speak directly to those dealing with loss.
A soulful exploration of the way humans love and how they cope with death.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-76515-9
Page Count: 228
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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