A revelatory book that should sustain May’s reputation and influence for at least another generation.
A penetrating yet tender engagement with one of the 20th century’s leading psychologists.
Rollo May (1909-1994) once defined therapy as “the search for one’s own myth.” Biography, then, might be read as the search for someone else’s myth. Abzug, a history professor and chair of the Jewish Studies program at the University of Texas, takes this approach, and the May that emerges from the search is one who swings wildly among grandiosity, self-doubt, profound insight, personal fumbling. It’s a far more honest portrait than May’s public image as a self-confident intellectual with his life figured out. Readers gain access to May’s inner struggles through his uncensored journals, which May gave the author three decades ago and from which he draws deeply to achieve extreme intimacy with his subject. But May lived in the world as much as his journals, and Abzug provides an excellent introduction to May’s work that also serves as a useful overview of the tenets and major figures of 20th-century psychology. May’s intellectual life was robust, and he interacted with Alfred Adler, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich before reaching his own prominence. Later in his career, he became a leading figure in existential psychology, joining Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow at the forefront of the humanistic “third wave” of psychological study. If it sounds like May was everywhere at once, he was, authoring journal articles and books, giving public lectures, attending conferences, teaching, and, of course, treating patients. Refreshingly, Abzug doesn’t dwell only on May’s career. In addition, he offers portraits of youth, family, marriages, affairs, rivalries, illnesses, and deaths—all the rich stuff of life as it concerns a man who was committed to understanding and experiencing the fullest possible range of human possibility.
A revelatory book that should sustain May’s reputation and influence for at least another generation.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-19-975437-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.
In this debut memoir, Bahamian millionaire Bastian offers insight into building a business.
The author was a millionaire by the time he was 19, an impressive feat considering he began his working life filling stockpots and rolling napkins in his father’s Nassau restaurant, a locals’ hole-in-the-wall far from the city’s tourist hotels. “In many ways, I started ten steps behind the starting line in a world where opportunities felt few and far between,” writes Bastian in his introduction. A poor student with a gambler’s risk tolerance and a salesman’s eye for an unserved market, the author dropped out of college to launch his own satellite installation business—the first of its kind in the Bahamas—eventually expanding into prepaid phones and other electronics. With this book, Bastian uses his personal experiences to illustrate the steps aspiring entrepreneurs should consider when building their own empires. “My goal isn’t just to tell my story,” he explains; “it’s to provide you with a starting point, a strategy, and the encouragement you need to take your first step toward something bigger.” The book alternates between memoiristic chapters describing the author’s youth and career and instructional chapters outlining the best practices to “become a lion” (his preferred metaphor for a brave, risk-taking captain of industry). From evaluating one’s skill set and choosing a suitable goal to the practicalities of regulation and taxes, Bastian walks the reader through the complicated processes of starting and maintaining a successful enterprise. While much of the advice is of the boilerplate variety, the author offers it with clarity and candor, devoting an entire chapter, for example, on how to fail productively. It is the biographical material that lends his advice unusual weight—Bastian’s stories of flying back and forth between the Bahamas and Miami to personally import satellite dishes are fascinating enough to stand on their own. Readers may be unable to replicate his success, but there is no denying that his tale is inspiring.
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798891882485
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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