A poet and creative nonfiction professor grapples with motherhood and the meaning of life in this memoir of raising her developmentally challenged daughter, Fiona.
As Lanier notes at the beginning, she had followed all the best-practices advice throughout her pregnancy—organic fruits and vegetables, no GMO, maintaining a seated position leaning forward with “my elbows propped on my spread knees like I was forever on the verge of imparting a proverb”—to make certain that hers would be a “SuperBaby.” But Fiona was born with the extremely rare Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome, which has profound developmental affects relative to mental growth, speech, coordination, and other areas. It has a high youthful mortality rate, and “there is no specific treatment.” The author struggled mightily to cope with the severity of the diagnosis: “I was free-falling….My sadness was no longer the selfish reaction that my baby wasn’t, would not be perfect, but that we could lose her….My cry was an emptying….My cry was a collapse.” Lanier writes with powerful humanity as she charts her course, and one of the first lessons she learned was that when anyone chooses to have a child, they “sign up for the fragility of life.” The author is especially sharp on her journey to remake herself, to pivot away from “the desperate, clinging, distraught version who wanted what her child was not.” Along the way, she forcefully condemns the concept of a hierarchy of lives worth living. Her abiding love for Fiona is clear throughout, and it’s heartening to watch her learn to reject the idea that disability is deficit. “We can only open our arms, say welcome,” she writes, and she is clear that this means being vulnerable, “often fallible, but always open, and raw, and real. And present to the whole messy world.”
A book of pluck, spirit, and great emotion with an appealing perspective on the value of each human life.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-55963-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | HEALTH & FITNESS
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
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All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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