A compelling, if sometimes-painful, read that offers a lesson in personal resilience.
A hard-luck memoir, intertwined with life lessons on empathy.
This account of psychologist Marshack’s (Entrepreneurial Couples, 2017, etc.) traumatic trials and tribulations will likely elicit great empathy for the author herself. In a personal narrative that’s troubling but often engaging, she documents the fallout from her divorce, her challenging relationship with her daughters (one is autistic and the other suffers from the effects of a brain injury), and her arduous, toxic legal battle with neighbors over property rights. It’s almost unimaginable what the author goes through, and following her journey from chapter to chapter could leave one emotionally spent. Her negative experiences led her to consider why some people have empathy and others do not; her reflection resulted in the “Empathy Dysfunction Scale (EmD Scale),” which she says can help readers “identify the kind of people you’re dealing with in your life.” Overall, though, the book largely concentrates, almost to a fault, on the injustices that the author says that she suffered during a very ugly dispute with authorities and neighbors over residential land use. Indeed, the extent to which the book describes the case—with accompanying reprinted emails and property drawings—is extraordinary, and its tone sometimes feels almost vindictive. However, the book is engaging when it addresses Marshack’s five levels of “EmDs.” The second chapter does a particularly good job of describing each one of these, ranging from EmD-0 (“having zero degrees of empathy but not intending harm”) to EmD-5 (“epitomizing empathy”). By the end of the author’s sad but engaging tale, the EmD levels do resonate, and the implications of empathy dysfunction become clear.
A compelling, if sometimes-painful, read that offers a lesson in personal resilience.Pub Date: March 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-979969-00-0
Page Count: 554
Publisher: US Observer Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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