An intimate, inviting, and accessible inventory of lessons one man learned on the road to 40.
A debut autobiographical manual targets the no-longer-young set.
Deal’s work blends personal memories and life lessons, told by a man who has seen his share of happiness and heartache. He narrates coming out as gay to his parents over the dinner table and their disastrous reactions (it severely broke their relations at the time). In a rhetorical move that will be repeated many times over during the course of the volume, he instantly turns the story of that all-too-common tragedy into a fulcrum for a quick lesson about self-reliance and the drive to turn bad situations around. Deal attended Florida Atlantic University, got his master’s degree from Nova Southeastern University, and transformed a stocking job into a 20-year career in the Ralph Lauren Corporation. He traces his own trajectory through school years, vacations, family crises, a cheating partner, his abusive father (who was eventually sentenced to time in federal prison for his involvement in a drug cartel), and a dozen tales about college friends and work colleagues. He always fills them with amusing or touching personal notes—and inevitably comes back to anchor new lessons. Some of these offerings are so simple as to be self-evident (“If you need to say something, say it”; “Remember your college years fondly”). Others are distractingly flippant, as when Deal caps a chapter about keeping physically fit with “if body image is something that you are struggling with, work even harder because I feel more fabulous than ever,” adding, “Woo-hoo!” (A few of the guide’s axioms can be unintentionally funny, as when he warns his readers: “Some friends can be toxic to you in every sense of the word.”) But the book adds to its winning approachability with plenty of photographs of the author and his friends and family, and the ultimate effect is of sitting across a table from Deal, listening to his favorite yarns.
An intimate, inviting, and accessible inventory of lessons one man learned on the road to 40.Pub Date: April 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-1800-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving, heartfelt account of a hospice veteran.
Lessons about life from those preparing to die.
A longtime hospice chaplain, Egan (Fumbling: A Pilgrimage Tale of Love, Grief, and Spiritual Renewal on the Camino de Santiago, 2004) shares what she has learned through the stories of those nearing death. She notices that for every life, there are shared stories of heartbreak, pain, guilt, fear, and regret. “Every one of us will go through things that destroy our inner compass and pull meaning out from under us,” she writes. “Everyone who does not die young will go through some sort of spiritual crisis.” The author is also straightforward in noting that through her experiences with the brokenness of others, and in trying to assist in that brokenness, she has found healing for herself. Several years ago, during a C-section, Egan suffered a bad reaction to the anesthesia, leading to months of psychotic disorders and years of recovery. The experience left her with tremendous emotional pain and latent feelings of shame, regret, and anger. However, with each patient she helped, the author found herself better understanding her own past. Despite her role as a chaplain, Egan notes that she rarely discussed God or religious subjects with her patients. Mainly, when people could talk at all, they discussed their families, “because that is how we talk about God. That is how we talk about the meaning of our lives.” It is through families, Egan began to realize, that “we find meaning, and this is where our purpose becomes clear.” The author’s anecdotes are often thought-provoking combinations of sublime humor and tragic pathos. She is not afraid to point out times where she made mistakes, even downright failures, in the course of her work. However, the nature of her work means “living in the gray,” where right and wrong answers are often hard to identify.
A moving, heartfelt account of a hospice veteran.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-481-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
