A witty, charming, and revealing retirement account that lacks pretenses.
A memoir combined with a self-help book explores adjusting to life in a retirement community.
This brief work is a noble effort to expose the emotions surrounding a life-changing relocation. In conversational style, Adler (The Way It Was, 2012) relates her experience of deciding with her husband to move from her longtime home to an apartment in a retirement community. An effective technique in the volume is the use of “two voices,” the author’s “everyday voice…declaring this and that with abandon” and “an inner, more sensible, more informed voice which surfaces now and then.” The work is divided into 27 abbreviated “stages of adjustment,” expressed from Adler’s point of view. The stages help reveal her internal conflict about moving, deftly illustrating that making such a choice is neither easy nor uncomplicated. Contrasting statements such as “I don’t want to live with all those old people” and “Some of these people have led amazingly interesting lives” bring out the author’s complex feelings with refreshing candor. Adler’s reflections on her previous life are filled with poignancy. About her relationships, she writes: “But what I really miss are the neighbors. My friends. These new people are perfectly pleasant, but they’re not my real neighbors, my old good friends.” Her account of what life is like at the retirement community is endearing. For example, she had a wonderful experience taking part in a play: “I met some kindred spirits, and the best part was that I felt like I was part of the gang.” Other descriptions are amusing. At one point, she claims, “I am never going to take the bus,” but later she laments, “Why did it take me so long to discover this bus?…I totally love this bus.” The seesaw nature of the author’s tale continues throughout the volume, but she cleverly keeps the story moving toward a positive conclusion. The audience for this book—individuals who are facing the potentially scary prospect of moving to a retirement community—should find solace in Adler’s insightful observations.
A witty, charming, and revealing retirement account that lacks pretenses.Pub Date: April 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5439-6619-0
Page Count: 72
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
