A well-meaning but inarticulate self-help book.
Harris offers new approaches to being single in this debut memoir and advice guide.
Life brought Harris unforeseen challenges, including her parents’ divorce in her youth and her own breast cancer, but it didn’t bring her the expected boon of marriage. From high school to her late 20s, she always had a boyfriend, she writes, but has now resigned herself to spending her life alone. This brief memoir lays out Harris’ justification of that choice in chapters that address such subjects as “Self-Hate transformed into Self-Love,” “Developing a Faithful Relationship” with God, and “Being Free & Letting Go of Fear & Self Doubt.” Blank, ruled sections labeled “Self-Reflection Notes” suggest that the author intends readers to use the book as a devotional guide. This Christian-focused book offers well-intentioned, empathetic outreach to fellow singletons; for example, a one-page chapter encourages volunteerism, and other short sections endorse spontaneity and hobbies. “Dancing is Freedom” is a multipoint essay on the benefits of recreational dance. However, the quality of the prose makes it hard to gauge the book’s potential helpfulness. Repetitive language causes this 48-page book to seem strangely wordy: “My new adventure within my journey was definitely something different, which it was an opportunity for me to recall those centuries of information and apply it to my journey.” Overall, the book’s practical advice is minimal, and potentially useful guidance sinks in a sea of banalities: “Always taking the road less traveled has enriched my life” or “Focus on the ‘END-RESULT’ and your outlook on life will be consistent and ‘POSITIVE’ for all that surrounds you.” The six poems included feel amateurish and redundant, as in the line, “to be quiet is to be silent,” and sometimes compromise between rhyming and free verse, with off-rhyme lines such as “To be quiet, to not sing a tune, / To meditate and calm your inner room.”
A well-meaning but inarticulate self-help book.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500743512
Page Count: 48
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2014
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
