bookshelf

LOVE YOU LIKE THE SKY

Name: LOVE YOU LIKE THE SKY
Author: Sarah Neustadter
ISBN: 978-1-943006-88-5

SURVIVING THE SUICIDE OF A BELOVED

by Sarah Neustadter ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 4, 2019

An affecting collection of correspondence by a grieving woman seeking healing and peace.

bookshelf

A guide to dealing with the suicide of a loved one.

In 2008, after the sudden death of her boyfriend, who threw himself in front of a train in Mountain View, California, Neustadter spiraled into seemingly hopeless depression. However, she was unwilling to inflict similar pain and despair on her own loved ones by taking her own life. Most of the self-help books that she consulted left her with the feeling of being “talked to and coached at, not joined with,” particularly as her main desire was to reconnect with the person whom she lost. In a peculiarly 21st-century response to this feeling, she began writing emails to his former Yahoo! Mail account. The result is this book, the author’s nonfiction debut, in which she groups the emails she wrote into larger categories, such as “Despair,” “Shifting,” and “Beauty,” and adds her own extensive insights on emotional crisis and personal recovery, guided by her experience as a transpersonal psychologist. The author intends her book as “a companion in grief for any survivor left behind without his or her beloved,” and she supplements her personal reflections with a section on spiritual practices and grief resources. However, the heart of the book, and its most memorable element, are the messages to the author’s late boyfriend, which effectively flesh him out as an individual and underscore the immediacy of Neustadter’s pain after losing him: “You became everyone’s favorite,” she writes in an email about their early days together. “How could we resist your white Mickey Mouse hoodie no grown man should ever wear and your big, innocent blue eyes, so light, like the sky?” This device is an effective one, and every one of Neustadter’s readers will immediately sympathize with it; that said, this particular method of grieving may not be a healthy choice for everyone.

An affecting collection of correspondence by a grieving woman seeking healing and peace.

Pub Date: June 4, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-943006-88-5

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Spark Press

Review Posted Online: April 3, 2019

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SELF-HELP | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

bookshelf

The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)