A touching memoir that allows readers to experience the everyday life of a widow attempting to move on.
A woman struggles to find freedom, independence, and inner peace following the sudden death of her husband in this memoir.
After her longtime husband Brad’s unexpected death, Booth (Yellow Bird Walking, 2009) decided to reinvent her life. Although she struggled to overcome her grief, she eventually traveled, joined a dating site, and made new friends. She writes that she’s sharing her story because she wants to help other widows regain confidence and find happiness, but it seems as if she also wanted to write this book in order to help her own healing process. She tells of playing “pranks” on her husband by leaving a plastic spider around the house, and how he would tuck “the covers in all around me like a mummy” during their “nightly routine,” which are sweet tributes to their marriage. Unfortunately, platitudes such as “laughing really is the best medicine” take away from the narrative’s emotional power. The book’s episodic nature also gives the story a directionless feeling; for example, in one chapter, she recounts the saga of trying to get spousal benefits from the veterans administration, but the next chapter revolves around her seeing a spiritual adviser. To her credit, she has a knack for surprising readers; at one point, for example, she gets a tattoo commemorating her husband, and she states the painful reality that “In a 14 month period, I had lost my husband, my job, and my father.” Ultimately, the story of an older woman exploring her individuality after 44 years of marriage is a refreshing one, and it’s satisfying to see Booth attain a sense of freedom as she moves into her own apartment for the first time. Though it “was very difficult to accept,” she says, she realized that she couldn’t “continue to define [herself] as part of a couple,” except in her heart.
A touching memoir that allows readers to experience the everyday life of a widow attempting to move on.Pub Date: March 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5043-5358-8
Page Count: 136
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2016
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
