A timelessly relevant chronicle on enduring grief.
How the impact of human loss transcends the lives of the bereaved.
As she did in the bestselling Motherless Daughters (1994), which examined the emotional challenges of women who grew up without a maternal figure, Edelman dissects the dynamics of grief. “I wish there were a foolproof method for ‘getting over’ the death of someone we love,” she writes in the lucid preamble. However, “everything I’ve experienced, learned, and observed over the past thirty-eight years has taught me otherwise.” Drawing on her in-depth interviews with 81 individuals, the author looks at how the grieving process shaped her subjects’ lives and could potentially impact their futures as well. Edelman’s personal journey, though repetitive, is also noteworthy: Her mother died of breast cancer in 1981 at age 42, and she discusses the ever evolving meaning of her death, particularly once she became a parent and “really understood how foreshortened my mother’s life had been and what she’d missed out on by dying so young.” The author also explores grief from a historical perspective through eras devastated by war and disease, and she taps into psychological, societal, and gender-specific patterns of mourning, referencing research studies on such concepts as “the rings of grief.” Sensitive readers should brace for the heartbreaking profiles of people whose lives never fully rebounded from the catastrophic loss of a loved one, whether the death was sudden, protracted, or shrouded in mystery. These varied perspectives coalesce to show how grief endures longer than most people ever realize. Edelman emphasizes that while we may never truly outlive the fallout from loss, it becomes an element of life that can be integrated into our own unique versions of felicity. “Unexpressed grief from the past may be one of the most overlooked public health crises of our time,” writes the author, who proactively seeks to change cultural perceptions about the way it is viewed, with an eye toward improved support networks for post-traumatic growth.
A timelessly relevant chronicle on enduring grief.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-399-17978-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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