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
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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