Both humble and wise, a poignant reflection on a life of perseverance.
A personal reflection on a life of emotional challenges and the lessons drawn from them.
Debut author Hepburn grew up in the Bahamas and experienced no shortage of adversity from the very beginning of her life. Her father was convicted of second-degree murder and imprisoned for it, and her mother suffered from an intellectual disability. As a result, she was largely raised by her grandparents, and she weathered both emotional and physical abuse under their custodianship. To make already difficult matters worse, Hepburn was sexually abused starting at the age of 8 a harrowing experience that robbed her of her youthful innocence. By the time she became a teenager, she was addled with chronic depression and attempted suicide. The author languished through several failed romantic trials and finally found herself in the midst of a breakdown before she sought professional mental help. That counsel, and the practice of meditation, helped Hepburn clamber out of a hole of emotional enervation and find peace and renewal. “However, if we choose to live, the longer we do, we find that life is not an enemy out to get us. It has its seasons, and each provides us with something that can be used to take us to the next.” The memoir is structured around a series of stand-alone anecdotes, each with its own edifying lesson; there are 14 stories and lessons in total. Also, each lesson is discovered with the help of a friend—the author believes that personal revelations are generally midwifed by those we trust, and so the entire book is a kind of homage to her friends. The lessons themselves tread familiar ground for anyone who has ever read a self-help book or has a wise grandmother: trust your intuition, avoid self-victimization, love people for who they are, and trust that your circumstances aren’t as bad as you think are a representative sampling of what Hepburn offers. The power of the book is really the personal context within which those lessons are delivered and the author’s grace in the face of tribulation.
Both humble and wise, a poignant reflection on a life of perseverance.Pub Date: May 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-1593-9
Page Count: 168
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
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
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
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