by Kristina Kuzmić ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 11, 2020
A generous guide through the bumpy terrain of parenting.
An exhausted, stressed, loving mother shares her experiences.
Making her book debut, vlogger Kuzmić, known by her viewers as “the mom who finds humor in every nook and cranny of motherhood while shoving brownies in her mouth and drinking coffee straight out of a coffeepot,” offers hope and support to parents like herself: “wounded by our failures, hobbled by our insecurities.” A decade ago, divorced with two young children, the author was struggling financially, working weekends as a waitress, when she decided to launch a cooking blog, Sticky Cook. Nine days after launch, she was invited to submit a video pitching her own TV show as part of a competition run by the Oprah Winfrey Network. To her amazement, she won, and although her show, The Ambush Cook, ran only one season, Oprah embraced her. “Once you’ve eaten hot dogs with Oprah,” writes the author, “you expect your life to be different.” Remarrying and having another child did make her life different: better in many ways and more complicated. But her TV experience inspired a new project: a parenting video that quickly went viral. Within days, it had over 1 million views. Besides writing about meeting her second husband, dealing respectfully with her ex, and raising children, Kuzmić recalls growing up in Croatia during the nation’s War of Independence in 1991, learning to cook beside her beloved grandmother, immigrating to the United States, and suffering sexual assaults as a 5-year-old and as an adult. Mostly, she writes about motherhood, which she describes as “the most heart-filling part of my life, and it is also at times the most heartbreaking.” A worrier who has struggled with depression and low self-esteem, Kuzmić tries to foster gratitude, self-confidence, and empathy in her children. With her self-absorbed teenage son, she embarked on a game: In two hours, they would complete three random acts of kindness. “The game,” she writes, “is now on regular rotation in our family’s activities” to remind them that each can make other people’s lives better.
A generous guide through the bumpy terrain of parenting.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-56184-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking Life
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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by Cheryl Strayed ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2015
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
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012
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
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