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
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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
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