Stylistically a bit awkward, but an honest, powerful book nonetheless.
Eight true stories of perseverance through adversity, interspersed with applicable advice and resources.
In their second book together, Mulcahy and Knowles (What You Need to Know Before Your Child Starts Secondary School, 2008) explore a wide range of challenging topics including domestic abuse, sexuality, teenage motherhood and immigration. Knowles begins by recounting her brother’s suicide and her own process of understanding his untimely death. From there, she reflects on the impact her relationship with her brother had on her relationships with others as well as her general outlook on life. Mulcahy follows, sharing the story of how a series of accidental head injuries affected her daughter’s cognitive and emotional capabilities. As she explains, her daughter’s traumatic injuries affected the entire family, increasing their sensitivity toward others. Mulcahy and Knowles go on to interview six other individuals who bravely discuss their own harrowing experiences, including teen pregnancy and growing up gay with an alcoholic father. Within each story, Mulcahy and Knowles embed bulleted advice from counselors and experts on the topic at hand, as well as a list of online resources and support groups for readers who may be dealing with similar issues. Although admirable and accessible to a wide audience, the efforts to integrate practical information into these personal stories can disrupt the narrative flow, sometimes with awkward results. Additionally, the authors are sometimes prone to generalizing: For instance, Knowles posits that “when a child can overcome the difficulties of an abusive home, they often become adults who are really effective at helping other people because they know what it’s like to have been there.” Perhaps two people who have survived similar situations will be able to empathize with one another, but the supposition that they will inherently understand each other seems to diminish the individuality of personal experience. The book’s greatest strength, however, is in its humanistic interview process. The interviewees effectively convey how their attempts to overcome tragedies and traumas helped shaped their lives—welcome reassurance for readers looking to do the same.
Stylistically a bit awkward, but an honest, powerful book nonetheless.Pub Date: July 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1475027044
Page Count: 106
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2013
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
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
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