As refreshingly southern and satisfying as a cool glass of iced tea.
With all the charm of Robert Fulghum, screenwriter Johnson spins a few yarns, shares a few vignettes and offers a variety of commendable life lessons.
Johnson was raised in rural South Carolina, a place where the difference between Baptists and Methodists matters; where people call soda “Co-Cola,” never Coke (or, God forbid, Pepsi); where Conway, S.C. is considered a metropolitan area. As a child he was taught to appreciate the simple things in life, and he learned the importance of hard work and community–not to mention good food. Indeed, the story is redolent with fine Southern cuisine: country ham, fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, pecan pie, banana pudding and more. Not just a paean to home cooking, Johnson has also crafted a loving ode to his parents–his dignified, selfless mother and his inquisitive, loving father–who raised him right. At the end of the day, he can barely remember the four-star restaurants he’s visited as an adult, but he has lasting memories of the simple meals he enjoyed with his family at the IHOP. Also enlightening is the author’s take-no-prisoners critique of contemporary communication technology–cell phones, caller ID, email. We may use these gizmos to facilitate relationships with our loved ones, he says, but in reality, we hide behind them. In fact, says Johnson, we now live in a throw-away culture where we casually discard whatever seems inconvenient, whether “Styrofoam or marriage.” Compared to the homey, comfortable world of Johnson’s childhood, today’s cell phone landscape seems bleak. He concludes the final chapter by acknowledging that we all just get through life “the best damn way [we] can.” Good advice for anyone, and Johnson’s musings offer soothing companionship along the way.
As refreshingly southern and satisfying as a cool glass of iced tea.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58348-232-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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