The author's memories of early adolescence, as taken from her rediscovered diaries. Israeloff (In Confidence, 1989), a contributing editor at Parents magazine and the mother of two, found her diaries and began reliving her experiences in the eighth grade. A former honors student, Israeloff relates with astonishing accounting skills the exact score on nearly every test she took in that pivotal year. Though the diaries read like the awkward scribblings of a precocious adolescent, Israeloff the grown-up has determined to see something more sinister: the ghost of the success she would have been if she were a boy. ``Rutherford,'' her father's pet name for her, takes on enormous weight and serves as a tired metaphor for the male child Israeloff was not. It is an unfortunate choice. Israeloff's adult musings are forced, and her recollections of the eighth grade are mercilessly mined for evidence of academic deprivation: An item of crude graffiti on one of Israeloff's student-council campaign posters is rendered in heartbreaking terms, although the author admits that she had forgotten the incident until the diary brought it back to her. A long series of A+ papers and other accomplishments contradict the complaints of Israeloff that, as a female, she was overlooked. Vague references to studies showing that women lose academic courage in high school are not borne out in Israeloff's case by the text, which covers her high school years in a few short paragraphs. Israeloff reaches her stride in gentle reminiscences of her father, but her broad generalizations about her home life lack nuance. The obligatory visit to her old school is sadly lifeless, and her amorphous rage at a former doting teacher offers an ugly end to this memoir. The star of her eighth-grade class, devoted as a young girl to logical argument, has produced a narrative stocked with sweeping statements ill supported by facts.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80081-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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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