Provides a solid road map for dealing with life’s curveballs in a constructive way.
An author presents a straightforward system for coping with stress and crisis.
While readers might not be able to prevent life’s many upheavals, both big and small, they can control how they handle them, according to Drapeau (co-author: How Did You Do That!, 2009). After facing down several disasters, including his wife’s terminal illness, he developed a simple and accessible seven-step “Shatterproof System,” which he promises will help readers “navigate, manage and rise above any crisis.” Most people respond to events such as a job loss or illness with feelings of anxiety, vulnerability, and failure, the author explains in this compact, pointed volume. These reactions are normal, but they can become traps that negatively affect their lives and health. By embracing the clearly outlined Shatterproof principles and completing the useful exercises at the end of each chapter, individuals should be able to effectively surmount crises and push forward. The process begins with acknowledging the situation, followed by accepting and embracing the opportunities it presents even though such a move “requires a paradigm shift away from feelings of victimization and helplessness.” Additional steps include examining worst-case scenarios, freeing oneself from worry, and creating a robust plan to regain equilibrium. Readers are also encouraged to complete a “gratitude inventory” and embrace faith in a higher power in order to foster confidence. (That final step might alienate nonreligious readers.) Anecdotes from the author’s own life as well as examples from his friends and family successfully illustrate the principles in action. Several of these stories, particularly Drapeau’s reflections on his wife’s battle with cancer, are truly moving and inspiring. The tone throughout is positive and uplifting without straying into the realm of banal self-help clichés. Anyone who gets bogged down in decision-making or is overwhelmed by unexpected events stands to benefit from the author’s levelheaded advice and his persuasive suggestion that retreating from the chaos and developing mental focus are what are needed to take command and make wise choices.
Provides a solid road map for dealing with life’s curveballs in a constructive way.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9976749-0-3
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Horizon Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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