A serene evocation of a dark season.
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Winter offers a chance for renewal.
In an intimate meditation on solitude and transformation, English journalist, essayist, and fiction writer May reflects on changes that occur, in nature and in one’s sense of self, during the cold, dark season. Wintering, she writes, “is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, side-lined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.” The author homes in on one particular winter that began in September with her husband’s emergency appendectomy, which confronted her with the fragility of life and immanence of death. As the season progressed, she also was beset by ailments: tonsillitis during a trip to Iceland, debilitating stomach pain that required months of investigation, insomnia, depression, and bouts of anxiety. Chronicling the months from fall to the coming of spring in March, the author shares her observations of the changes—migration, hibernation, and the dropping of leaves—that seemed “a kind of alchemy, an enchantment performed by ordinary creatures to survive.” Like hibernating animals, May, too, found herself craving more sleep as the days became shorter. Instead of migrating to warmer climates, though, she traveled to see the aurora borealis, and she took a New Year’s swim in frigid water, experiences she found exhilarating. Interwoven with her observations of nature are myths, folktales, and children’s stories in which wintry landscapes often take on a magical quality. For May, winter is “a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order,” and for accepting “the endless, unpredictable change that is the very essence of this life.” Readers enduring forced hibernation during the pandemic may find wise counsel from May: When “feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favoured child: with kindness and love,” eating and sleeping enough, and spending time “doing things that soothed me.”
A serene evocation of a dark season.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-18948-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | NATURE | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PSYCHOLOGY | BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | SELF-HELP | HEALTH & FITNESS | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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An engrossing memoir as well as a lively treatise on what extraordinary grace under extraordinary pressure looks like.
17
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The former first lady opens up about her early life, her journey to the White House, and the eight history-making years that followed.
It’s not surprising that Obama grew up a rambunctious kid with a stubborn streak and an “I’ll show you” attitude. After all, it takes a special kind of moxie to survive being the first African-American FLOTUS—and not only survive, but thrive. For eight years, we witnessed the adversity the first family had to face, and now we get to read what it was really like growing up in a working-class family on Chicago’s South Side and ending up at the world’s most famous address. As the author amply shows, her can-do attitude was daunted at times by racism, leaving her wondering if she was good enough. Nevertheless, she persisted, graduating from Chicago’s first magnet high school, Princeton, and Harvard Law School, and pursuing careers in law and the nonprofit world. With her characteristic candor and dry wit, she recounts the story of her fateful meeting with her future husband. Once they were officially a couple, her feelings for him turned into a “toppling blast of lust, gratitude, fulfillment, wonder.” But for someone with a “natural resistance to chaos,” being the wife of an ambitious politician was no small feat, and becoming a mother along the way added another layer of complexity. Throw a presidential campaign into the mix, and even the most assured woman could begin to crack under the pressure. Later, adjusting to life in the White House was a formidable challenge for the self-described “control freak”—not to mention the difficulty of sparing their daughters the ugly side of politics and preserving their privacy as much as possible. Through it all, Obama remained determined to serve with grace and help others through initiatives like the White House garden and her campaign to fight childhood obesity. And even though she deems herself “not a political person,” she shares frank thoughts about the 2016 election.
An engrossing memoir as well as a lively treatise on what extraordinary grace under extraordinary pressure looks like.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6313-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2018
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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