Movingly captures the effect one well-loved teenager had on his community.
Debut author Richards’ novel is based on the author’s journey through grief after the loss of her son.
When 16-year-old Tyler died in a car accident in Walled Lake, Mich., on Sept. 21, 2003, the tragedy sent shock waves through his family and his community. His parents and brother suffered the sharpest sense of loss, but as a kind, popular teen, many friends and neighbors felt the weight of his death as well. In the novel, everyone mourns differently—some look for signs that he’s with them in spirit, some cope with their feelings through writing, some speak about him at public functions to honor his memory—and while the pain never disappears completely, his loved ones gradually begin to heal as they draw together in support and affection. Richards spends some time exploring the aftereffects of Tyler’s death from the teen’s perspective as he watches over his grieving loved ones from heaven. The emphasis, however, is primarily on his mother’s mourning process (Tyler watches over her whenever she visits his grave or writes in her journal). The book also includes a large number of letters and poems written about Tyler, and these help diversify the perspective. In one letter, his cousin Megan said, “I promise to continue to tell every person I meet about the wonderful person you were.” His friend Amy wrote a poem: “Goodbye to my friend / There will never be an end / To what you’ve left behind / To the memories, in everyone’s mind.” The notes vary, but each expresses how much Tyler means to whomever wrote it. The people who knew Tyler while he was alive continue to be affected by him after his death. The book describes Tyler as a hardworking athlete with great spirit and an eagerness to help his peers whenever possible; after his death, a scholarship fund is set up in his memory, and the money is awarded to those students who best exhibit his degree of sportsmanship.
Movingly captures the effect one well-loved teenager had on his community.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1460212882
Page Count: 216
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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