A heartfelt and winningly optimistic guide to understanding—and finding more—friendship.
An analysis of the challenges of making friends in the modern world.
Vellos has trained as a facilitator and conducted hundreds of hours of workshops on building communities and forming adult friendships, and in her nonfiction debut, she attempts to break down the nature of friendship in the “always on” 21st century—its roots, its potential obstacles, its most familiar patterns, and some strategies for its improvement. The stakes have never been higher, she says: “the average American hasn’t made one new friend in the last five years.” And the price for this trend is steep: Loneliness and isolation place enormous stresses on the body and the mind. Vellos distills her wide reading and dozens of interviews on the subject into an assessment of what she terms “platonic longing,” the desire felt by increasing numbers of people for the simple joys of close friendship. She addresses her book to readers who’ve found they have nobody with whom to share moments of pain, confusion, or joy—to those, for example, who’ve gone on a dating app and wondered if it might work if they’re looking only for friendship or who have tried friend-matching apps too and found that the great connections they promised haven't materialized. She outlines many approaches to the complexities of friendship, from upping “your dosage” (simply trying to create more friendship time with friends you already have) to practicing greater honesty when meeting potential friends. Throughout she focuses on the basics of friendship that writers from Cicero to Norman Vincent Peale have stressed: openness, flexibility, and, most of all, commitment. “No amount of ‘I really like you too’s’ will convince someone that you want to be friends if you don't take actions to make time and space for them in your life,” she says. The sheer amount of energy and inventiveness on display in these pages, engagingly written and illustrated by the author, will give even the most jaded some hope for more friendships in the future.
A heartfelt and winningly optimistic guide to understanding—and finding more—friendship.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73437-970-9
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
With poetic prose and vivid watercolors, Yang has created a rich portrait of life in China during the 1930s and '40s. Yang chronicles her Baba's (or Daddy's) boyhood and adolescence in 20 tales, each preceded by a watercolor. Baba was the fourth son in the eighth generation of the wealthy House of Yang, and his landscape teems with physical and spiritual dangers. He's threatened by torrential rains, ravenous wolves, red-bearded bandits, famines, demons, Japanese bombs, Russian troops, Communists, Nationalists, even an arranged marriage. When Baba is six, his family is forced out of their Manchurian homeland after the Japanese invasion. They move to China proper, then return five years later when Baba's father loses his job with a mining company. They live under the protective patronage of the family Patriarch until a bloody tug-of-war between followers of Mao and Chiang Kai- shek rends the family and country apart. Ancient legends, political upheavals, and religious ceremonies define Baba's youth. Storytellers teach him about gods and demons, prodigal sons, and the ghosts of the improperly buried. Their wisdom then plays out in his own life as Baba witnesses the goddess of Mercy protect his mother from marauding invaders; the troubled ways of one of his older brothers; and a 49-day funeral ceremony ensuring his great- great-grandfather safe passage to Heaven. Yang's prose feels ancient and foreign; for instance, she describes the effects of the first Japanese bombs: ``The glass windowpanes inhaled and exhaled, but the paper panes heaved a sigh and suddenly gave way, cracking like white porcelain.'' The tension between ancient rituals and modern reality elevates these tales from the merely beautiful into an astonishing personal vision, and a unique portrait emerges of a culture straddling thousands of years. Yang's work is like a lovely painted scroll swimming with wild souls, beasts, birds, flowers, day and night sky, tragedy, and hope.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-100063-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
A welcome pinprick in the bloated hot air balloon of management advice–should accompany The 8th Habit or Raving Fans in the...
A necessary icy dash of pessimism in the warm sea of feckless optimism that is the business management genre.
Like Machiavelli's The Prince or Swift's Gulliver's Travels, this parody of "Business Inspiration" contains more verisimilitude on one page than does an entire library penned by Steven Covey. Remaining a shadowy figure throughout, Kersten looks out from the author photo–rendered as a Wall Street Journal pen-and-ink portrait–with a heavenward gaze that rivals that of Ralph Reed seeking divine guidance. Credit him with the ability to couch the actual facts of most business organizations in jargon that even a Ph.D. would understand. Kersten’s essential point is that most businesses, seduced by the pernicious myth of the "Noble Employee," waste precious time and ungodly sums of money attempting to transform mediocre wage slaves into superstars. This is wrongthink, he avers. Not only can you not teach a pig to sing, but in so attempting, you sacrifice a lot of bacon. Passive, dependent, unmotivated employees are easier to exploit and require relatively low maintenance. Accordingly, managers who spoil employees by boosting their self-esteem are only contributing to employee narcissism. Employees must be put squarely in their place–in Kersten’s world, this falls somewhere between medieval serfdom and indentured servitude. Radically demotivating employees includes such techniques as creative amnesia–"forgetting" employees’ names and contributions; also, managers should respond impersonally to employees, refraining from sharing or engaging in eye contact or emotional displays. Kersten even advocates physical "cleansing" after employee contact–make sure to apply antibacterial liquid after an employee handshake.
A welcome pinprick in the bloated hot air balloon of management advice–should accompany The 8th Habit or Raving Fans in the same manner that The Wealth of Nations should accompany Das Kapital.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 1-892503-40-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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