A sincere but uneven work for those weathering a crisis.
In this memoir/self-help book, a songwriter seeks to console and inspire readers.
In 1990, Friedman wrote a song called “Help Is on the Way,” performed by Nancy LaMott, about remaining hopeful even in times of difficulty. It would eventually become one of the anthems of the AIDS crisis. With this book, the author hopes to replicate that feat, offering a mix of stories, affirmations, and inspirational quotes to buoy those in need of a lift. Some of the wide-ranging tales come from Friedman’s personal life: his family history, his childhood, and his long career on Broadway and as a fixture of New York City’s cabaret scene. There was the time his father borrowed money from relatives to buy his own paint factory. “Talk about Help Is on the Way,” the author jokes, “almost everyone he asked contributed. Even his mother-in-law, who was living on a small, fixed income, reached into her ‘secret stash’ and gave him $10,000.” Or the time Friedman realized his attempts to force his singing voice to be a certain way was keeping him from discovering his voice’s natural tendencies. Only in being himself was he finally able to effectively sing. The author’s prose is conversational and unhurried, and his stories have an appealing, homilylike didacticism to them (attributable, perhaps, to his partner’s career as a nondenominational minister). Here, Friedman provides an explanation of humility: “What this means is that when you have a problem, you hand it over to someone or something that knows better than you how to resolve it. For example, when I have a broken toilet, I humbly call the plumber, because I know that the plumber knows how to fix it.” While many of the tales and quotes are pleasantly uplifting, the volume leans so hard into the eponymous song that it starts to become a distraction. The author mentions it frequently; the full lyrics appear twice in the work; and each chapter takes its title from a line in the song. Friedman also includes lyrics from some of his other songs in several of the chapter-ending quotation sections. There’s a recycled quality to all of this that suggests a lack of original thought. Encouraging anecdotes aside, it’s difficult to imagine the book finding a wide audience.
A sincere but uneven work for those weathering a crisis.Pub Date: May 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1736241820
Page Count: 237
Publisher: Library Tales Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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