Science and psychology inform the engaging memoir of an author on a self-help mission.
Her mother’s unexpected death inspires a Yukon Territory–based adventurer and travel journalist to face her fears.
In a harmonious blend of memoir and science reporting, Outside correspondent Holland describes her attempts to “learn to master my fear,” embarking on a three-year project of research and treatment following the devastating death of her mother. Her mother had been an orphan, shaken by the death of her own mother, which left the author anticipating her mother’s death more fearfully than anything else. When Holland’s fears were realized, she fell apart, unable to work or deal with people and falling into free-floating anxiety and the occasional panic attack. Other fears came to the fore of her consciousness—e.g., a fear of heights from a childhood escalator mishap (though she later learned that her father had suffered from something similar and that such fears might be genetic in origin) and lingering PTSD from a series of car crashes. The book is most compelling at its most personal, as the author makes her story seem both specific and universal: “An irony: fear is an experience that unites us, even as, in the moment, it makes us feel very much alone.” Holland faced her challenges through both exposure therapy and pharmaceutical applications, and she traces the theories of fear and how to treat it, including Freudian therapy, lobotomy, electroshock treatment, and other more modern approaches. Throughout the narrative, the author develops herself as a protagonist whose fears are serious enough to benefit from treatment but whose condition should strike a responsive chord in many readers. Her goal is not to eliminate fear, which serves as a tool for self-preservation, but to put it into perspective. By the end, she writes, “I am much less afraid of fear itself.”
Science and psychology inform the engaging memoir of an author on a self-help mission.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61519-600-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The Experiment
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
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
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