Eminently readable and worthy of attention.
A trip through the author’s mental illness told in a heartwarming, self-deprecating style.
It’s hard not to immediately fall in love with a narrator who begins her tale of annual hospitalizations and a suicide attempt with this description of her bipolar disorder: “To me, the word implies savant-like capabilities. The label crazy is equivalent to the GED of mental disorders, whereas bipolar sounds more like holding a PhD in the field. ‘Congratulations, you are bipolar!’ ” It just gets better from there. From a tongue-in-cheek portrait of the psych ward’s command post, which reads, “It’s this glass-enclosed circular structure where the staff is stationed and on display for the patients to poke fun at. Needless to say, it’s a noisy location. There’s always some patient banging on the glass, declaring his seventy-two-hour notice of release. No matter how delusional patients may be, they always seem to be cognizant enough to know their legal rights”; to a gorgeous deep analysis of a fellow patient, “I pull back the curtain, allowing the setting sun to cast a soft amber light on her face. I hesitate for a moment as I study the weathered lines on her face. Why do we feel the need to erase our wrinkles? They define who we are and tell our stories. On second thought, maybe that’s why we feel so compelled.” Haynes jumps back and forth in time, mirroring her own manic thought processes, and devotes chapters to her son and husband so that they may have their say, all in the blink of an eye and with the humblest of hearts. Her eloquence is strikingly clear-headed for a self-proclaimed “crazy” person. Indeed, a chapter where she compares psychosis to divine revelation is simple and powerful, ending with, “Call me crazy, but I happen to believe in things unseen, unheard, unspoken, and intangible. I have no other choice.” Eat your heart out, James Frey.
Eminently readable and worthy of attention.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-1643-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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