Highly personal, strangely comforting and profoundly moving.
The special bond between a young woman and her exceptional grandmother extends far beyond the grave in this pleasingly metaphysical mashup of self-help manual and memoir.
In life, Callan’s grandma Rose was quite a woman—the kind of vital person who always seemed preternaturally plugged in and fully engaged in the endlessly wondrous world around her. Growing up in the woman’s electric orbit had a profound effect on the author. So much so that when Rose ultimately died at the age of 90, Callan continued to regularly interact with the deceased woman’s spirit in times of both trouble and doubt. “Grandma Rose didn’t waste any time setting up this new form of communication with us,” Callan writes. “She wanted to let everyone know right away, in as theatrical an approach as possible, that yes, she’s still here.” Featuring cozy vignettes of life with the author’s Broadway-loving grandma, each chapter concludes with examples of those otherworldly occurrences. Dinner plates suddenly crash, and songs containing particularly trenchant lyrics play at opportune times. As a yoga practitioner—as her grandmother was before her—the author is finely tuned to Eastern philosophy, so it’s not surprising that she excels in interpreting her warm, familial memories of both her grandmother and grandfather within a spiritual framework. In every recalled interaction with Rose, Callan finds New-Age lessons of mindfulness, self-determination, impermanence and the like. Those unaccustomed to such concepts, however, will still find plenty of other points of connection throughout this highly readable reminiscence of Grandma Rose. Take, for example, the charming story of how the author’s family once took on San Francisco’s famed Lombard Street in a 1968 Dodge Monaco dubbed “The Boat,” which should be enough to put a smile on the reader’s face. Whether the paranormal experiences are interpreted as truly supernatural or merely wishful thinking, they succeed in serving as profound testaments to the enduring power of familial love.
Highly personal, strangely comforting and profoundly moving.Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4827-0564-5
Page Count: 222
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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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