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
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
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.
A basketball legend reflects on his life in the game and a life lived in the “nightmare of endlessly repetitive and constant pain, agony, and guilt.”
Walton (Nothing but Net, 1994, etc.) begins this memoir on the floor—literally: “I have been living on the floor for most of the last two and a half years, unable to move.” In 2008, he suffered a catastrophic spinal collapse. “My spine will no longer hold me,” he writes. Thirty-seven orthopedic injuries, stemming from the fact that he had malformed feet, led to an endless string of stress fractures. As he notes, Walton is “the most injured athlete in the history of sports.” Over the years, he had ground his lower extremities “down to dust.” Walton’s memoir is two interwoven stories. The first is about his lifelong love of basketball, the second, his lifelong battle with injuries and pain. He had his first operation when he was 14, for a knee hurt in a basketball game. As he chronicles his distinguished career in the game, from high school to college to the NBA, he punctuates that story with a parallel one that chronicles at each juncture the injuries he suffered and overcame until he could no longer play, eventually turning to a successful broadcasting career (which helped his stuttering problem). Thanks to successful experimental spinal fusion surgery, he’s now pain-free. And then there’s the music he loves, especially the Grateful Dead’s; it accompanies both stories like a soundtrack playing off in the distance. Walton tends to get long-winded at times, but that won’t be news to anyone who watches his broadcasts, and those who have been afflicted with lifelong injuries will find the book uplifting and inspirational. Basketball fans will relish Walton’s acumen and insights into the game as well as his stories about players, coaches (especially John Wooden), and games, all told in Walton’s fervent, witty style.
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1686-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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