An insightful and touching testament to enduring love.
In this spiritual healing guide, the husband of an artist and therapist who died of brain cancer showcases her drawings and writings, as well as his own journal entries and poems.
In the winter of 2012, Judy Smoot embarked on an exciting new direction in her life: She’d enrolled in a two-and-a-half-year certification course by the Expressive Arts Florida Institute. Later, she and her husband, Roy Smoot, sold their family home of 25 years in Westerville, Ohio, and relocated to a lovely rural cottage in the southeastern part of the state. In the fall of 2015, however, “came the nightmare we never anticipated,” Roy writes: Judy was diagnosed with glioblastoma—the same aggressive brain cancer that had taken the life of her beloved aunt. This book is Roy’s posthumous collection of Judy’s expressive art (including mandalas with titles such as “Solace in the Cycle”) and journal entries, which often included meditations on biblical and other readings. Her writings date from prior to her diagnosis, during her treatments, and after she experienced a stroke; by the time of her death in 2016, she’d reached a state of spiritual acceptance. Roy also includes several of his own journal entries from the same time periods, and the book’s final section features the poems he wrote as he worked through his grieving process, culminating with the one that gives this book its title, which reads in part: “Love, grief / Joy, sadness / Laughter, sobs and tears / … / It all belongs.” Roy notes that reading Judy’s journals was a key element in his healing, and his inclusion of her thoughts in this book may offer inspirational support to others; she’d been a hospice volunteer and ran a nonprofit supporting the chronically ill. Both Judy and Roy (who are credited as co-authors, along with collaborator Folse) offer tangible ideas for readers facing similar circumstances—most particularly, they recommend engaging in expressive art and journal writing. Roy’s habit of writing in public, for example, led him to experience important conversations and make new connections.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9780982696064
Page Count: 299
Publisher: SparkPoint Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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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