A bravely told and brutally honest self-help work.
A candid guide for people living with multiple sclerosis.
In 1980, at the age of 25, Petrina began showing symptoms of MS, but it wasn’t until four years later that she was officially diagnosed and decided to become an advocate for others with the disease. This second edition of her book, first published in 2011, offers fresh perspectives provided by an additional, harrowing decade of experience with MS. Petrina’s own story is a key focus, of course, but her main objective is to offer guidance and hope to others. Her background, which she discusses in Part I, tells of her experiences as a National Multiple Sclerosis Society peer counselor and MS blogger (some of her blog posts appear in the back of the book). The second part provides a helpful overview of MS symptoms and treatments as well as other basic information. In Part III, Petrina lays out unvarnished truths about the effects of the disease on the body and the brain; here, with great candor, she explores such topics as the digestive system, sexual dysfunction, spasticity, and what she calls “The Elephants in the Room”: mental and behavioral health, substance abuse, addiction, and suicide. Petrina’s description of her pregnancy and subsequent MS flare-up is particularly poignant. Part IV includes helpful guidance regarding employment, long-term disability, and relationships with other people in addition to an uplifting section titled “Positives to Having MS,” which notes, for example, that “You take nothing for granted.” Petrina writes with a relentless optimism, but she’s unafraid to reveal the toll that the disease has taken on herself and her family. The author’s truth-telling makes her advice all the more affecting. These words from the book’s opening chapter are sure to linger: “I didn’t have a choice about getting [MS], but I did have a choice about whether I was going to let it control me or manage my life.”
A bravely told and brutally honest self-help work.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1662917943
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
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
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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