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
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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