A moving testament to the power of unconditional love and its ability to get us through our darkest hours.
In her debut memoir, Konrad eloquently captures the complexities of her relationship with a larger-than-life sister whose towering presence—both literally and figuratively—molded the family in ways big and small.
Konrad, the baby of the family, was Willie and Rosie Smith’s third daughter, nine years younger than her mercurial sister, middle child Sandra. Her earliest memories are of Sandra’s doing things like throwing a fit after every shampoo. In hindsight, Sandra’s seesawing mood swings and “talent for manipulation” should have served as warning flags of trouble ahead. But the Smith girls, despite being African-Americans in the Jim Crow South of the 1940s, were brought up in Houston, Texas, by doting parents whose unconditional love glazed over glaring faults. As Sandra came of age, her bold and domineering personality smothered everyone around her, including the Smiths’ oldest daughter, Jackie. “I really didn’t have much of a social life and much of my time was dominated by concern for my sister,” Konrad remembers. “The agony that comes when a sibling acts out impacts everyone. In my case, I was particularly vulnerable as Mama always managed to draw me into it—up close and personal.” Overweight as a child, with problems of her own, Konrad was regularly roped in to mediate issues she did not yet fully grasp, the pawn between Sandra and her mother, Rosie. The memoir brilliantly captures the complexities of growing up in the shadow of a domineering figure whose grip on attention meant less room for everyone else to blossom. Konrad movingly chronicles Sandra’s steady downhill descent from star high school student to member of Houston’s underworld. Only when a devastating tragedy grounded Sandra did she remarkably turn her life around, with help from her long-suffering family and devoted husband, Charles. Eventually, Konrad served as caregiver to both her aging parents and to Sandra, whose life, with its highs and lows, Konrad believes, was filled with blessings of motivation and grace.
A moving testament to the power of unconditional love and its ability to get us through our darkest hours.Pub Date: June 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5049-1565-6
Page Count: 216
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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
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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