Society has conspired to conform us to its image, and we need to fight back to reclaim our individuality, according to this well-reasoned cultural critique and self-help book.
Lewis comes out of the gate swinging and ready to rumble with any reader who doesn’t agree that many of us need to be freed from our “conforming and cultural conditioning.” A former university art professor and department chairman at the University of Memphis, he includes schools, organizations and families among those he says have conspired to make us buy into their beliefs and act like everyone else. The remedy? In order to regain independence and a sense of playfulness, you must “force quit, demagnetize yourself and reboot to have fresh awareness,” he writes. As he diagnoses society’s ills, Lewis argues that TV, the Web and video games have become the world for many people. “Lost is wonder and the curiosity to independently explore, discover and objectify an experience within the real-time specificity of place and occasion,” he writes in academic, peopleless prose. Fortunately, he gets his venting out of the way quickly and begins to sound much more human. The "hyper-reality" of the information age is frequently a target for Lewis, who argues that instead of doing things, we now watch things. On a trip to Rome, he stayed at a hostel, where two fellow travelers made an impression on him. One was a young woman whose glowing cellphone screen wakened him at 3:30 a.m. as she texted someone back home. The other was a young Indian man who aimed to speed-travel Europe, checking off the popular sites of Rome in a day and planning to conquer Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland the next weekend. Lewis is no mere cultural crank, however, and he offers some excellent tips on “zapping” the energy drainers in our lives. Limit TV. Journal. Find beauty in creativity. And limit media oversaturation if you want to be truly wise, he writes. It’s a good reminder for a tech-addicted world.
Sage advice for creative souls and those who long to be.
Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499624359
Page Count: 168
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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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