A how-to-talk-to-the-bereaved compendium that delivers some familiar advice.
Two debut editors collect thoughts on processing grief in this anthology.
It’s hard to know what to say when offering consolation. When someone you know has lost a spouse or close family member, the same pat responses always seem to come out of your mouth. “Twice before, I’d stood beside parents on the day of a child’s death, a witness to the awkward ballet of distraught looks, too-tight hugs, and tear-choked words that attend shattering loss,” writes Fisher in her introduction. “I’d heard fumbling attempts to comfort that surely only deepened the pain of the bereaved.” This book’s stated purpose is to help readers be better friends to the grievers in their lives. Fisher and Jones solicited short pieces—both poems and prose—from writers who had lost someone close to them. Some deal with the nature of sorrow itself while others focus more directly on the ways that other people treated the contributors during their mourning periods. In the poem “10 Things I Would Tell You if You Were Still Here,” Jami Kahn writes that “people keep asking me how i’m doing, like you were a sprained ankle or a broken nail. i tell them i have phantom limb syndrome, and they just frown, like i’m hopeless. (maybe they’re right.)” In the short essay “In Search of Peace,” Setareh Makinejad tells how she rebuked relatives who attempted to get her to stop wearing black after the death of her daughter. In addition to the pieces, these contributors answered questions about the best and worst things people said during their moments of anguish. As in all anthologies, the individual items are hit-or-miss. The tragic topic may forgive the frequent incidents of sappy and otherwise poor writing, but the reader wonders why the editors included so many works that don’t really have anything to do with the interactions between the still living. The survey questions are more useful, given the book’s worthy objective. While they present a few helpful tips, the participants are so similar in their advice (listen, bring food, hang out, don’t make it about yourself) that the text quickly becomes repetitive, providing few surprises.
A how-to-talk-to-the-bereaved compendium that delivers some familiar advice.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-242-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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