by Sarah Wheeler ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 2, 2018
A stark and honest investigation into the author’s personal ordeals.
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A woman examines the trauma of her past in order to offer advice to others in this self-help work.
As readers go through life, they are writing their own users’ manuals via a process of trial and error. “When do our manuals start?” writes Wheeler (Be Your Own Best Friend, 2015). “I think they start as soon as we realize that certain feelings resonated with certain awarenesses. For example, the first time I saw violence, I was aware that it wasn’t right and that it hurt me.” Violence was, unfortunately, a mainstay in the author’s life from early childhood to adulthood. According to Wheeler, her father was physically abusive to her and her siblings, and her stepfather was sexually abusive to her during her teen years. A lack of role models and poor decisions led to a series of abusive relationships with boyfriends, culminating in the tragic and vicious end of her first marriage. Despite the violence, drug use, emotional abuse, suicidal thoughts, and morally difficult decisions, the author managed to turn her life around by seeking help and discovering her inner strength. She discusses the impact of medication, therapy, spirituality, and family on her healing process, offering readers one possible manual they might follow to make their own lives better. Wheeler writes in a simple but honest prose that presents the difficulties she has faced in a frank, almost journalistic manner: “I started thinking of ways to kill myself. I would take a lot of Tylenol with the alcohol I stole from my mom. I would try to cut my wrists, but I wouldn’t follow through because it hurt to push through my skin.” Despite her deep well of traumatic experiences, the author never writes from a place of presumed expertise. While she discusses the importance of faith in her life, she does not frame it in a way that makes it seem as though readers must also adopt it. She simply recounts her experiences and what she has learned from them, and, for readers, seeing this evolution will likely be more affecting than the checklists and posed questions of more polished works in the genre.
A stark and honest investigation into the author’s personal ordeals.Pub Date: March 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5043-9935-7
Page Count: 108
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012
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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by Cheryl Strayed ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2015
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
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