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
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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