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
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
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.
A basketball legend reflects on his life in the game and a life lived in the “nightmare of endlessly repetitive and constant pain, agony, and guilt.”
Walton (Nothing but Net, 1994, etc.) begins this memoir on the floor—literally: “I have been living on the floor for most of the last two and a half years, unable to move.” In 2008, he suffered a catastrophic spinal collapse. “My spine will no longer hold me,” he writes. Thirty-seven orthopedic injuries, stemming from the fact that he had malformed feet, led to an endless string of stress fractures. As he notes, Walton is “the most injured athlete in the history of sports.” Over the years, he had ground his lower extremities “down to dust.” Walton’s memoir is two interwoven stories. The first is about his lifelong love of basketball, the second, his lifelong battle with injuries and pain. He had his first operation when he was 14, for a knee hurt in a basketball game. As he chronicles his distinguished career in the game, from high school to college to the NBA, he punctuates that story with a parallel one that chronicles at each juncture the injuries he suffered and overcame until he could no longer play, eventually turning to a successful broadcasting career (which helped his stuttering problem). Thanks to successful experimental spinal fusion surgery, he’s now pain-free. And then there’s the music he loves, especially the Grateful Dead’s; it accompanies both stories like a soundtrack playing off in the distance. Walton tends to get long-winded at times, but that won’t be news to anyone who watches his broadcasts, and those who have been afflicted with lifelong injuries will find the book uplifting and inspirational. Basketball fans will relish Walton’s acumen and insights into the game as well as his stories about players, coaches (especially John Wooden), and games, all told in Walton’s fervent, witty style.
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1686-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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