A soothing, practical how-to for the grief process.
Management consultant Paris presents a guidebook on coping with grief.
In this book, the author shares advice, journal prompts, and recipes that comforted her after her husband of 25 years died in 2018 from lung cancer. “We all deserve to be well-cared for, especially as we deal with the loss of our beloved,” she writes. Regarding the early days of grieving, Paris offers do’s(go outside, take a nap, cry, or ask for help) and don’ts (don’t make financial or housing decisions, drive if you’re “feeling unsure about it,” or try to please others). She advises readers to write down memories of their beloved, and she offers tips to ease insomnia, such as drinking a cup of chamomile tea. Paris also encourages gentle forms of physical movement, such as tai chi and yoga, and explores the disorientation and denial that’s common in “grief fog,” which may require reality checks from a friend or therapist. Other topics include dealing with the beloved’s belongings, reclaiming confidence, and managing money. The book also includes keen insights, such as the fact that recipes are often written to serve two people; Paris suggests sharing the second serving with a friend or freezing it for later. Her own reciperepertoire includes healthy foods, such as yogurt smoothies; savory meals, including fish fillets; and not-too-sweet treats, like blueberry cobbler. Paris’ gentle tone throughout this self-help book is like that of a longtime best friend. Her advice is simple yet effective; for example, she offers the useful tip to get two baskets for mail—one for bills and the other for personal correspondence—so that one can more easily attend to business matters (or ask a family member to do so) and reserve other kinds of mail for when one feels more capable of responding. Paris also doesn’t shy from addressing sensitive issues, including “dark thoughts” that may appear after a loved one’s passing. Although the author’s intended audience is female(she begins each chapter with “Dear Sisters”), her advice will be useful to grieving people of any gender.
A soothing, practical how-to for the grief process.Pub Date: April 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780879467302
Page Count: 250
Publisher: ACTA Publications
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
