The faithful may see an inspiring story of the happy life and untimely death of a little girl whose father will always love...
A father’s loving tribute to his angelic daughter who succumbs to brain cancer.
Beaucher details his daughter’s fatal journey from her diagnosis with medulloblastoma at age 2 and a half to her death two months after her ninth birthday. The book is as much a journal of Beaucher’s feelings as it is a chronicle of his daughter’s illness, as much his story as hers. He describes Kristin’s initial symptoms, diagnosis and treatment; the five and a half good years between her remission and relapse; and the last five months after the first signs of the cancer’s return. Beaucher’s voice makes the story feel more like a listen than a read, and his vulnerability and concern for his daughter lend pathos to the narrative. He wrote the book “to show people what she accomplished and how she did it. With the gaze of her eyes, the soft touch of her hand, the soothing sound of her voice, and sometimes not saying a word at all, she changed the outcome of people’s lives…I would say that it was pretty miraculous, don’t you think?” An overabundance of individual thank-you’s litters many of the chapters, and the coverage of events is inconsistent. Beaucher spends a chapter describing how he gets a tattoo of Kristin (a sign from God gave him the go-ahead), but he tucks away in the epilogue a brief mention of his decision to get a divorce from Kristin’s mother and spends little time relating how that affected Kristin, except to say that her prayers brought them back together. Devout readers may gain inspiration in Kristin’s tale, others may tire of Beaucher’s Pollyannaism. But the author never wavers in depicting his daughter as he saw her. “She was perfect in every way, shape, and form…Kristin was the most amazing person I knew.”
The faithful may see an inspiring story of the happy life and untimely death of a little girl whose father will always love her; others will find an overlong fairy tale sadly lacking its happily ever after.Pub Date: July 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-1452045986
Page Count: 268
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2011
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
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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