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
The audience for this long-winded but well-meaning memoir will consist of TV-biz nerds and Cagney & Lacey devotees.
A memoir for hardcore fans of Cagney & Lacey, penned by its former producer.
From 1982 to 1986, the acclaimed TV series was one of CBS’s prime-time anchors, garnering huge audiences, critical plaudits and numerous awards. Producer Rosenzweig was there from the beginning to the bitter end. The author adored the show; it was his baby, and he made certain that everything about it–the writing, acting, casting and costumes–met with his exacting standards. His love for the show was so enduring that more than 20 years after it was cancelled, he was compelled to share the entire experience in a lengthy memoir. Though the author’s heart is in the right place, the book is detailed to the point of tedium: Each battle with the network, financial negotiation, encounter with the actors and the writing staff is related in painful detail. The book is written in bite-size, episodic chapters, which makes the narrative uneven, and the prose is often clumsy–“Scoff and titter are not commonplace verbs in my vocabulary. They are the only terms I can conjure to portray the behavior to which I felt I was being exposed.” Readers won’t begrudge Rosenzweig for sharing his moment in the sun with the TV-watching public. His passion for the show and television in general is palpable, and this book might well inspire budding producers to follow their aspirations.
The audience for this long-winded but well-meaning memoir will consist of TV-biz nerds and Cagney & Lacey devotees.Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-595-41193-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Neither helpful nor humorous.
A self-help book disguised as humor.
On the surface, veteran self-help guru St. John is a good guy. He’s offered advice for the masses in print and on television, and wrote advice book Get Out of My Way–I’m Late For My Life (2003). In the introduction to his sophomore outing, he breezily discusses how important humor is to personal growth–a concept that seems like a fine launching point for an advice book. Unfortunately, one page later, we learn that St. John’s idea of helping is to insult and demean. A slight book, every page of this alleged parody consists of a cartoon rendering of one of eight “clueless characters,” each offering up two or three sentences of daily affirmation beginning with the promise, “Today I will...” St. John’s clueless characters are imbued with what most will consider stereotypical and offensive qualities. There’s Aquanetta Jackson, an African-American single mother of four who “takes her kids to see their fathers in prison annually.” (Yes, it says “fathers.”) There’s Soo Yoo, a 20-something Korean woman who manages a small manicure business and “screams for no reason.” And there’s Spencer Sterling, a metrosexual who “frequents gay clubs only for the attention.” The advice is, at best, unfunny, and at worst, inflammatory and obnoxious. For example, under the header “Karma,” Aquanetta tells us, “Today, I will intentionally inflict pain on stupid people. They have it coming.” In his ham-fisted, nasty manner, St. John is obviously telling us to do the exact opposite of his characters, but the whole project is so mean-spirited that readers may choose to ignore the author’s “lesson.”
Neither helpful nor humorous.Pub Date: March 7, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-595-41655-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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