A woeful life revitalized by faith, love, perseverance and the anonymous rooms of recovery.
Stark detail, arresting honesty and a frenetic timeline permeate a woman’s painful recovery from a life of childhood abuse and drug dependency.
Pierrot says she wrote this memoir for readers “who love a good train wreck,” and the Texan’s life has definitely been a turbulent one. After undergoing abuse as a child, she was burdened by low self-esteem, wasting “a lot of time and opportunity thinking I was not enough.” In her adult life, one messy, short-lived marriage to olive-skinned Noel led into a physically abusive relationship with Rashid, and then on to Daniel and further transgressions, which eventually plunged her into a dark chasm of codependency, drug and sex addiction. Al-Anon and psychotherapy sessions jointly provided a safe haven from the author’s self-destructive downward spiral–she finally managed to forgive her parents and began to love herself again. Pierrot is an eccentric writer–at certain crossroads in the narrative, she addresses readers directly, asking if they want to continue or just skip forward to chapters more suited to their individual tastes. The book is split into separate sections (“Poster Child,” “The Road Map to Joy” and “Cast Iron Butterfly”) which lightly thread together each radically different period in her life. But as the book meanders along, Pierrot’s deeply felt yet choppy narrative flits between past and present, pain and enlightenment, and soon becomes mired in exposition and an overabundance of platitudes. The author redeems herself with an update describing how she’s currently living free of the chains of emotional and chemical dependency–her liberation takes on a particular urgency that leavens the overly hyperactive delivery. Ending on a high note, the book notes that Pierrot’s present work as a life coach enriches both her clients’ lives and her own, as a stable, happily married mother.
A woeful life revitalized by faith, love, perseverance and the anonymous rooms of recovery.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4196-5833-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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