It’s a feel-good tale of triumph, but one that frequently gets distracted from its purpose.
A memoir of Falack’s movement from painfully obsessed victim to Kripalu-certified yoga instructor.
In her formative years of frizzy hair and grades low enough to class her with a student who had Down syndrome, Falack was all too acquainted with feeling abnormal. But she didn’t know to question the normality of escaping from bad situations by counting—counting ceiling tiles, freckles within each tile, the facial features of people she was talking to, the number of letters in a neon sign and more. While there are early allusions to grim memories regarding her nanny, Naomi, Falack reports it wasn’t until a hypnosis session with her first psychiatrist that she confronted the residual terror left by Naomi’s stomach-churning breed of abuse. This revelation is pivotal to the titular journey; much of what the author describes, at length, is not. A detailed depiction of the young romance that blossomed into marriage, for instance, might fit if it was woven together with Falack’s reflections and fears about what she didn’t yet know to call a condition. As is, this section and others like it only upstage her struggles. Falack continued slipping out of the present moment and into the safety enumeration offered through her pot-smoking, mouthy, boy-crazed high school years and on into marriage and motherhood. Not until she was a grown woman having braved turbulent childbirths and her husband’s battle with addiction did she go to the psychiatrist who would finally diagnose her. She turned to Dr. Levine shortly after beginning yoga class; she credits the meditative aura of yoga with helping her recognize just how aggressive her bouts of counting had grown. On the tail of learning that her problem had a name, she learned that OCD was treatable with medicine—a variety of medicines actually. She went through the medication turnstiles in an attempt to rid herself of side effects from cottonmouth to night sweats that left her soaked. With the thought in mind that there had to be a better solution, she became more involved with yogic practices and retreats, eventually making the ascension from student to teacher.
It’s a feel-good tale of triumph, but one that frequently gets distracted from its purpose.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-1452079189
Page Count: 189
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2010
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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