This slim handbook written as a memoir and how-to book explores the uncharted territory of senior online dating, and DiGioia and her coauthor Ruggles (an online match) demystify this search while sharing their personal e-mails, experiences and lessons learned.
Times have changed, and seniors like DiGioia are going online for companionship and adventure after spouses or friends have died, after divorce or following a lifetime of being single. Senior women are learning to make the first move, and a generation taught to be modest is promoting itself online. Many seniors assume that online dating is for desperate losers. In response, DiGioia, an “overachiever,” details her years-long search for the right person in a conversational, self-revealing way. Her prose expresses optimism that eventually she will find the right one (in the end, she does marry) and cynicism about the dishonesty and rudeness (Internet silence, unexplained breakups) she encounters. Her persistence is impressive (“Be ready for heartbreak. If it happens, it’s a bump in the road, not a black hole”). In excruciating detail, she summarizes her encounters with men—the “frogs” she kissed, long-term friendships and heartbreakers. She catches men lying about their age, weight, smoking, sexual appetites and marital status. She experiences “screen rape” and “phone rape,” when an encounter turns offensively sexual. The amateur poetry she includes is sentimental, tinged with sadness. DiGioia reviews online dating sites, including Senior People Meet and Match.com. She advises men to “play down sex,” for women to guard their personal safety and for all comers to be honest with themselves and their matches. DiGioia and Ruggles, who alternately describe the experiences of men and women online, share a background in marketing that gives them insight into online dating as a sales transaction. Their quoted dialogues are confusing to follow, however, using incorrect punctuation. The format of personal reminiscence does not make for easy browsing, and the text is marred by spelling and usage errors. Even with its flaws, this book is a revealing glimpse into online dating for seniors, with their special needs, “baggage” and aspirations.
Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461089681
Page Count: 141
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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