Readers approaching their senior years will find a wealth of insights and motivation in these pages.
Twelve interviewees share how to “live all of life,” far into the elder years, in this self-help work.
In his sixth book, Elias sets out seven key tenets for reframing aging, gleaned from his 50 years as a psychologist and Chinese medicine practitioner. Twelve “pathfinders” speak to readers in excerpts from his interviews with them. These “modern-day sages” range in age from late 70s to 100-plus. Elias embraces “elderhood” as an opportunity for examining where one has been and where one refuses to go. As such, the book isn’t a bucket-list pep talk; instead, it encourages readers to remember their past selves, as when it asks them to revisit long-shelved dreams and pursue them once again. The work also suggests, among other things, that readers rewrite their life “scripts”; practice mindfulness; awaken joy through humor; exercise; and find one’s “tribe.” The author’s commitments to meditation, seeking presence, and other spiritual concepts dominate the latter parts of the book, but he designates “mind over matter” as the central theme. He effectively draws on his own experiences, as well, to round out his message, which isn’t focused on how to live a longer life, per se, but on ways to pack one’s latter years with vitality. The language is lively and often fun, in part because a colorful profile of each pathfinder opens every chapter. For instance, 80-year-old Carolee Schneemann, a maverick artist and feminist who in her youth attended Bard College on a full scholarship, says that she was once suspended for a year because she painted a nude self-portrait. Widespread recognition of her talents came late in her life, when, in 2015, the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg showed a retrospective of her art called Kinetic Painting. Her advice? “Keep sexually alive, eat kelp, and have a pet!”
Readers approaching their senior years will find a wealth of insights and motivation in these pages.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9966542-3-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Five Element Healing Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Lorde’s big heart and fierce mind are at full strength on each page of this deeply personal and deeply political collection.
The groundbreaking Black lesbian writer and activist chronicles her experience with cancer.
In her mid-40s, Lorde (1934-1992) was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a radical mastectomy. Through prose, poems, and selected journal entries beginning six months after the surgery, the author explores the anger, pain, and fear that her illness wrought. Her recovery was characterized by resistance and learning to love her body again. She envisioned herself as a powerful fighter while also examining the connection between her illness and her activism. “There is no room around me in which to be still,” she writes, “to examine and explore what pain is mine alone—no device to separate my struggle within from my fury at the outside world’s viciousness, the stupid brutal lack of consciousness or concern that passes for the way things are. The arrogant blindness of comfortable white women. What is this work all for? What does it matter if I ever speak again or not?” Lorde confronts other tough questions, including the role of holistic and alternative treatments and whether her cancer (and its recurrence) was preventable. She writes of eschewing “superficial spirituality” and repeatedly rejecting the use of prosthesis because it felt like “a lie” at precisely the time she was “seeking new ways of strength and trying to find the courage to tell the truth.” Forty years after its initial publication and with a new foreword by Tracy K. Smith, the collection remains a raw reckoning with illness and death as well as a challenge to the conventional expectations of women with cancer. More universally, Lorde’s rage and the clarity that follows offer us a blueprint for facing our mortality and living boldly in the time we have. This empowering compilation is heartbreaking, beautiful, and timeless.
Lorde’s big heart and fierce mind are at full strength on each page of this deeply personal and deeply political collection.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-14-313520-3
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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