An informative but stiff manual that delivers well-earned advice on business and marriage.
A guide to work-life balance advises professional couples.
Dual-income households have long been the norm in the United States, with women increasingly enjoying professional careers that rival or surpass their husbands’. Even so, succeeding as one of these “dual-career couples,” as Gordon and Bluestein call them, is not just a matter of landing the right jobs. It’s necessary that couples find a workable equilibrium so that the partnership can succeed at home while each of its members thrives professionally. When kids are thrown into the mix, it can get even more complicated. “Especially after they have children,” note the authors in their introduction, “couples often negotiate career decisions and work-life balance in response to short-term pressures rather than stepping back and constructing a sustainable framework for their lives. Some of those decisions cause later regrets.” With this book, the authors use their own experiences as a high-powered, professional couple to advise members of the next generation on how to achieve the careers they want while successfully building lives with the partners they love. They explain the best ways to be a supportive partner, manage money, negotiate compromises, and maintain an independent professional identity while sharing a unified domestic one. The authors can certainly claim to have dealt with these issues at the highest level. Gordon was a CEO for a Fortune 500 company while Bluestein worked as a consultant to some of the world’s largest corporations. Together, they raised two children. Though the majority of the guide concerns their own experiences, the prose reads more like a polished bit of copy than a memoir: “For Ilene, going to London was a way of breaking out of Boston. She loved the fact that it was a high-energy, very global city….Nowadays, when someone says they’re moving to Europe, Ilene advises, ‘do Asia, or else you’re not challenging yourself. Europe is too easy now.’ ” While the tips are fairly conventional, the advice is quite helpful. The presentation, on the other hand, is decidedly dated. There’s little emotion here for a book about relationships, which results in a rather wooden portrait of the central couple.
An informative but stiff manual that delivers well-earned advice on business and marriage.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73788-500-9
Page Count: 164
Publisher: The Blue Sun Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A heart-wrenching and impressively self-aware story of a father living through the death of his young child.
A devastatingly candid account of a parent’s grief that will have readers laughing and crying in equal measure.
Delaney is no stranger to balancing grief and humor, and it shows in this heartbreaking yet often darkly funny recounting of how he lost his third son, Henry, to brain cancer. The author’s work as a writer and actor in the dramedy series Catastrophe clearly primed him to share these poignant recollections. Few would attempt to bring humor and levity to such an unbearably sad story, but Delaney manages to do so with grace, sincerity, and warmth. His ability to weave laughter into something so dark also makes the book accessible for a wide audience, as the author gives readers permission to fully absorb his family’s story, to empathize and understand, without having to remain straight-faced and downcast. Throughout, Delaney includes playful but sincere asides: “Advice to people who have a friend or relative with a very sick kid: get right up their ass and go spend time with them. They’ll kick you out if they need to, but don’t waste their time by saying, ‘If there’s anything I can do, just let me know.’ That’s for you, not for them. You might as well yawn in their face while looking at something more exciting over their shoulder.” The narrative takes place mostly in London and serves as a sharp criticism of the American health care system in comparison to the British National Health Service, underscoring the additional strain many families of sick children suffer in the U.S. It is also a tender tale of how a family can remain loving and connected during and after tragedy, and Delaney pulls no punches in highlighting his own perceived shortcomings as a father and husband throughout the unimaginable ordeal. His raw honesty and ability to inject humor into the narrative are both charming and refreshing.
A heart-wrenching and impressively self-aware story of a father living through the death of his young child.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-954118-31-7
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
An exquisitely melancholy, reflective, and ultimately hopeful personal history of love and longing.
A brokenhearted transgender woman reflects on the evanescence of romantic love.
A decade ago, author Faye was traversing South London after-parties, openly apathetic about the notions of dating, falling in love, and relationships. Now, as a single woman in her mid-30s, her attitudes have changed. She’d found herself besotted, immersed in a love affair with a cis man for a year and a half, which then collapsed due to their own diverging styles of loving and her inability to bear biological offspring. Faye’s journey grieving the devastating breakup forms what she considers to be one of the “most ubiquitous of struggles” in her life as a trans woman. While she confesses that the excruciatingly painful “lovesickness devoured me from the inside out,” it also afforded her moments of formative reflection. Faye eloquently elaborates on how the idyllic and frustratingly elusive search for companionship has since evolved, forcing her to revisit and confront the old, damaging, self-destructive ideas about lovelessness and unworthiness she’d experienced as a dissonant, gender dysphoric young adult. The author’s referential and historical discussion about the ideal of romantic love is as fascinating as chapters on Faye’s trials on gay dating apps, the “tiny teenage humiliations” of adult male-to-female transition, attempts at separating emotional vulnerability and sex, and the culture of shame and invisibility around trans women as desirable, sexual people. Faye’s narrative diverts further still to debate the tenets of desire, motherhood, gender-critical feminism, and queer friendship, as well as addiction, her father’s alcoholism, and her own journey toward sobriety. A closing chapter on religion is awkwardly extraneous, but Faye’s prose is so conversational, readers won’t even notice. With language as crisp and passionate as that found in her report on systemic transphobia and social justice, The Transgender Issue (2021), Faye’s book deliberates over the pleasures and pitfalls of relationships, navigating them in a way that will appeal to all readers, regardless of their sexuality.
An exquisitely melancholy, reflective, and ultimately hopeful personal history of love and longing.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780374615529
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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