Highly recommended for the divorced and for those contemplating or embarking on divorce.
Beauregard’s debut memoir recalls an almost unimaginably terrible divorce interwoven with hard-earned advice on how to overcome crushing adversity.
By her own harrowing account, Beauregard hardly sounds like a victim. Raised in an upper-middle-class Connecticut family, she’s privileged, moneyed, well-traveled, and disciplined by ballet, a young woman seemingly on her way to happiness when she wed a man of Italian descent with a strong sense of family, matching her own. Her husband, she writes, turned out to possess a violent temper. As the years passed, he became progressively more domineering, controlling, and physically abusive. She had bruises both physical and emotional to prove it when her divorce case reached the courtroom after her abortive attempt to run away with the children. But in what, in her telling, sounds like a criminal act, the judge awarded physical custody of her three sons and infant daughter to this better-lawyered, courtroom-clever monster; the judge even tacked on child support payments due from her to him. When she didn’t pay on time, she barely escaped jail. Her loss grew even greater when she voluntarily signed over her share of the former family house to her ex-husband in hopes it would at least stop him from taking the children out of the country. Left with nothing, this ravaged and lost mother-in-exile here describes how she gradually recovered herself and her motherhood by using a technique she calls tunnel vision to block out negativity, end the pity party, shelve the violin, and focus laserlike on positive energy flow within an imagined tunnel. The vivid originality of this philosophy, which turns the dictionary definition of tunnel vision on its ear, makes Beauregard’s book succor for all who have gone through the horrors of divorce, particularly with children involved. But her more generalized admonitions tend to be scattershot, thus losing force. Some of her advice—love yourself, don’t look back but do look for silver linings—has been heard many times before. It’s also disappointing that she ends this otherwise authentic, inspiring story of personal grit with the hackneyed phrase “Go for it!” As for the divorce, readers might be eager to hear from the other side to get more context for the terrible affair.
Highly recommended for the divorced and for those contemplating or embarking on divorce.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1939288936
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Beauregard Books
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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
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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