A parent’s inspiring memoir, full of love, humor, and heartache.
A mother faces her child’s congenital heart condition in this debut book.
Mayer opens her work in December 1984, when she and her husband, Helmut, received alarming news about their only child, Marc, a mere 13 days after his birth. The jarring title came from the mouth of a cardiologist who gravely and insensitively assessed Marc’s prognosis at the beginning of their journey. Mayer, aghast, remembers thinking, “Incompatible with nature? What did that mean? Was I some kind of monster? How do you look a mother in her face and utter such a thing?” What sets this memoir apart is the author’s distinct sense of cultural displacement as an African-American woman living in Germany with a rudimentary grasp of the language at best. Consequently, a situation that was already stressful became even more exasperating as she struggled to communicate with medical professionals. Mayer, however, is courteous to her readers: on the few occasions when German is not directly translated into English, she provides enough context clues to convey the message in a comfortable and unobtrusive manner. Critically, her family in the Seattle area lent great support despite the distance, whether on the phone or through inherited refrains that Mayer invoked in times of crisis, such as “ain’t no givin’ up and no givin’ out” or “let go and let God.” These examples are indicative of the linguistic richness to be found throughout the text. There are also moments of humor despite the heavy subject matter, including this gem from the author’s mother that Mayer suddenly recalled during an awkward silence after she questioned the head doctor’s account of the treatments Marc had received on a particular day: “It’s so quiet you can hear a mouse piss on cotton.” Beyond the chronological reporting in this testament to a parent’s strength, the author shares lessons learned as a child and young adult via poignant flashbacks, especially regarding her relationship with her father. Thus, in addition to recounting harrowing events surrounding Marc’s condition, she allows herself space to reflect on philosophical notions like the slippery nature of time: “Out of reach, uncontrollable, too much and never enough, indeed it is too often the most mangled thread in the fabric of our human existence.”
A parent’s inspiring memoir, full of love, humor, and heartache.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5372-0129-0
Page Count: 358
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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