A solid blend of autobiography and self-help manual that addresses a global concern.
A writer ties the trauma of her upbringing to worldwide trends in loneliness and connection.
In this debut book, Heng combines a memoir with a self-help guide. She explains how she came to understand the lack of genuine human connection in her life and how it kept her from being fulfilled. At the same time, she investigated the broader global experience of loneliness and social isolation and how these have been worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic. The author, who grew up in Australia in a Chinese Singaporean family and later spent time in Switzerland, Dubai, and Singapore, discovered in adulthood that the dysfunctional norms she grew up with were a unique combination of cultural factors and her parents’ physical and mental illnesses. All of this left her without a strong sense of self or connection to others. Through therapy and research, she came to understand how the behaviors learned in her youth set her up for unhealthy relationships and inauthentic links to others. Each chapter mixes a personal story with big picture data from medical and psychological research and ends with Heng’s recommendations for how readers can strengthen their own relationships, build community, and combat loneliness for themselves and others. The book does a good job of making itself relevant by demonstrating the depth of the global problem of loneliness, and the author’s international perspective brings some variety to an often America-centric genre. Heng has a talent for vivid imagery (she remembers that her father “would come home from golf with arms like Cadbury top deck chocolate, white beneath his capped sleeves and dark brown on his forearms”), which makes the volume an easy and engaging read. The work’s nonlinear path through the personal elements of the author’s story (she moves back and forth between caring for her aging mother and recounting the childhood experiences that negatively shaped their relationship) can feel a bit meandering at times. But the serpentine narrative eventually reaches an emotionally satisfying conclusion that allows Heng to make a convincing case for how she has gone from a victim of loneliness to an adviser to others in the same position.
A solid blend of autobiography and self-help manual that addresses a global concern.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5445-2759-8
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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