A detailed and ultimately touching memoir in the form of a hospital manual.
A posthumous reconstruction offers a valiant young patient’s guide to dealing with hospital stays.
Jeremy Libon, the central figure and inspiration for this short debut book compiled by his family, was born with a congenital heart defect that led his doctors to warn that his odds of living even to the age of 2 were only 50-50. It turned out he lived until April 2010, dying at the age of 18, and in that time he demonstrated both an unquenchable spirit of optimism and a savvy, pragmatic knowledge of the hospital world through countless stays under doctors’ care. The segment of the book actually authored by Jeremy is blunt about the drawbacks of hospital stays, detailing annoyances like being woken up round the clock for vitals testing, IV changing, and the frequent taking of blood. He even addresses the dismal experience of being admitted to the hospital in the first place. His short segment also provides upbeat advice about reclaiming your life once you return from a hospital stay: showering the clinical smells off your skin and hair, and taking it easy (“There is nothing wrong with taking a nap during the day, no matter how old you are”). His section of the book is followed by remembrances of him by his brother, his father, and, in the most moving and practical-minded account, his mother. She continues the advice-giving theme of Jeremy’s section, talking to readers about tricks to stave off waiting-room boredom, and ways to navigate hospital regulations about visitors and family members sleeping in the building. Parents of severely ill children should find her advice valuable on subjects ranging from the power of distraction to the benefit of discussions with nurses (“They can help you figure out the day-to-day, nitty-gritty, quality-of-life issues that many doctors don’t concern themselves with”). The cumulative effect of all these different family voices makes Jeremy's death all the more crushing—and his courage all the more uplifting.
A detailed and ultimately touching memoir in the form of a hospital manual.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5122-2376-7
Page Count: 120
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2016
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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