Heady, fruitful explorations of ill-charted terrain destined for a population explosion.
Insightful vignettes of people navigating the squirrelly years between 50 and 75.
Lawrence-Lightfoot (Education/Harvard Univ.; The Essential Conversation, 2003, etc.) profiles 40 individuals who had, by one measure or another, successful working lives and then took a new tack after age 50—voluntarily or not. They may be educated and financially secure, but they are also fragile and assailable in ways they haven’t experienced for many years as they make their way over foreign ground. They frequently find it discomfiting to be scrutinizing their identities and seeking to align their values with their actions, notes the author: “Something in us feels we are being irresponsible, or inappropriate, or maybe even unseemly, when we admit our lust for new learning,” especially when society assumes it’s time for them to be put out to pasture. Lawrence-Lightfoot’s investigation is anything but a dry, academic study. Her voice is by turns thoughtful, soothing and plaintive, as well as hungry for understanding what does and doesn’t work for these pilgrims. Standardized educational formats aren’t much help, she discovers; “school values and practices may distort organic learning across the life span, compromising and masking the impulses that might make us productive and creative learners.” It’s eye-opening to witness all the heavy lifting involved in these skirmishes with the new, including a lot of inefficiency and circling. (Happily, readers also learn that “old burdens become lighter.”) Tension, strangely enough, may prove crucial—not the kind of tension that leads to stress, but the kind that demands reconciliation between opposing forces or the charting of new scenarios by confronting ancient traumas. Other qualities worth having in your quiver: “openness, fearlessness, humility, and [the] capacity to look foolish.” It helps to be surrounded by a caring society—which is either the good news or the bad news, depending on your reservoir of another helpful virtue: hope.
Heady, fruitful explorations of ill-charted terrain destined for a population explosion.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-27549-5
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
The book would have benefited from a tighter structure, but it’s inspiring and relatable for readers with depression.
The creator and host of the titular podcast recounts his lifelong struggles with depression.
With the increasing success of his podcast, Moe, a longtime radio personality and author whose books include The Deleted E-Mails of Hillary Clinton: A Parody (2015), was encouraged to open up further about his own battles with depression and delve deeper into characteristics of the disease itself. Moe writes about how he has struggled with depression throughout his life, and he recounts similar experiences from the various people he has interviewed in the past, many of whom are high-profile entertainers and writers—e.g. Dick Cavett and Andy Richter, novelist John Green. The narrative unfolds in a fairly linear fashion, and the author relates his family’s long history with depression and substance abuse. His father was an alcoholic, and one of his brothers was a drug addict. Moe tracks how he came to recognize his own signs of depression while in middle school, as he experienced the travails of OCD and social anxiety. These early chapters alternate with brief thematic “According to THWoD” sections that expand on his experiences, providing relevant anecdotal stories from some of his podcast guests. In this early section of the book, the author sometimes rambles. Though his experiences as an adolescent are accessible, he provides too many long examples, overstating his message, and some of the humor feels forced. What may sound naturally breezy in his podcast interviews doesn’t always strike the same note on the written page. The narrative gains considerable momentum when Moe shifts into his adult years and the challenges of balancing family and career while also confronting the devastating loss of his brother from suicide. As he grieved, he writes, his depression caused him to experience “a salad of regret, anger, confusion, and horror.” Here, the author focuses more attention on the origins and evolution of his series, stories that prove compelling as well.
The book would have benefited from a tighter structure, but it’s inspiring and relatable for readers with depression.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-20928-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Honest messages from one of America's best known women.
A compilation of advice from the Queen of All Media.
After writing a column for 14 years titled “What I Know For Sure” for O, The Oprah Winfrey Magazine, Winfrey brings together the highlights into one gift-ready collection. Grouped into themes like Joy, Resilience, Connection, Gratitude, Possibility, Awe, Clarity and Power, each short essay is the distilled thought of a woman who has taken the time to contemplate her life’s journey thus far. Whether she is discussing traveling across the country with her good friend, Gayle, the life she shares with her dogs or building a fire in the fireplace, Winfrey takes each moment and finds the good in it, takes pride in having lived it and embraces the message she’s received from that particular time. Through her actions and her words, she shows readers how she's turned potentially negative moments into life-enhancing experiences, how she's found bliss in simple pleasures like a perfectly ripe peach, and how she's overcome social anxiety to become part of a bigger community. She discusses the yo-yo dieting, exercise and calorie counting she endured for almost two decades as she tried to modify her physical body into something it was not meant to be, and how one day she decided she needed to be grateful for each and every body part: "This is the body you've been given—love what you've got." Since all of the sections are brief and many of the essays are only a couple paragraphs long—and many members of the target audience will have already read them in the magazine—they are best digested in short segments in order to absorb Winfrey's positive and joyful but repetitive message. The book also features a new introduction by the author.
Honest messages from one of America's best known women.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1250054050
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Flatiron View Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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