An earnest, uplifting self-help work that concludes awkwardly.
In this debut self-help memoir, a lifelong asthmatic rediscovers his love of bicycling, which he connects to life lessons.
While attending elementary school in the 1970s, Guerra loved football, but he struggled with annual bouts of tonsillitis. Spurred on by his coach, he succeeded in tackling players much larger than he was until middle school, when his classmates finally outgrew him. He also suffered from then-undiagnosed exercise-induced asthma, which dealt a further blow to his confidence. As a result, he didn’t take up sports again until he was in his 30s; this time, it was cycling, because of his fond memories of riding as a young man. Overweight, saddled with a sedentary job that he hated, and feeling unattractive (“I looked like a doughboy,” he writes), Guerra not only decided to shed the pounds but also to leave his high-salaried job. Drawing on retirement funds, he reinvented himself as a trainer, speaker, and writer. He also embarked on harrowing cycling challenges that required him to push his limits. Despite all of the back story, however, this book isn’t intended solely as a memoir, but also a self-help guide. The author quotes Albert Einstein (in the title) and motivational authors Dr. Wayne Dyer and Jack Canfield, among others. He concludes each chapter with “René’s Rules for the Road” which reiterate points, offer self-reflection exercises, and suggest techniques for living in the moment (“Don’t allow your ego to keep you from moving forward in your journey”). Overall, Guerra is a highly engaging storyteller, and he successfully draws parallels between lessons he’s learned while cycling and his optimistic outlook on life. The account of his mother’s death in 2016 and of being surrounded by butterflies on an exhausting multiday ride are particularly touching. He often references God throughout the text, but in an expansive, undogmatic way. However, in Chapter 11, Guerra quotes several testimonials from friends that could have been more organically woven into previous chapters.
An earnest, uplifting self-help work that concludes awkwardly.Pub Date: July 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-8245-8
Page Count: 121
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2018
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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