A well-told saga of recovery from loss and emotional breakdown and a tribute to ordinary blessings that made it possible.
A woman writes about her life experiences in order to cope with grief, addictions, and crises in this heartfelt memoir and self-help book.
Manning (Where the Water Meets the Sand, 2016), a retired middle school teacher and school district superintendent, looks back on a lifetime of traumas, including the death of her father when she was 9 years old; a teenage pregnancy that ended in adoption; and the death of her first husband in the Vietnam War, which left her a single mother to an infant daughter. She also dealt with psychological problems, including alcoholism, bulimia, the urge to cut herself, and major depression. An eight-month hospitalization in a Topeka, Kansas, psychiatric clinic in 1970 got her started writing about her troubles as a form of therapy, which she recommends to readers. Each chapter covers autobiographical reminiscences loosely arranged by theme; some recount fraught episodes in her life and others revisit positive memories and influences, including mentors who’ve helped her, family meal traditions, favorite recipes, and memorable musical performances. At the end of each chapter, she suggests writing exercises that treat similar themes and offers a few literary tips to make them more detailed and immediate. Along the way, she mixes in recovery teachings about maintaining sobriety (reciting the serenity prayer is a daily ritual for her), cultivating a sense of gratitude, and taking life one day at a time. Although the book is a bit of a ramble and sometimes repeats itself, Manning is a fluent writer who stocks her narratives with vivid anecdotes and character sketches. In darker moments of morbid obsession, her prose is truly harrowing: “I remember the immediate relief as I watched the blood drip from my wrist into the toilet. I stared down into the bowl, hypnotized by the swirling pink clouds, and rested my head on the toilet seat, no longer feeling alone, panicked, or crazy.” The book isn’t very useful as a manual for writing, but Manning’s creative explorations make her psychological insights feel hard-won and credible.
A well-told saga of recovery from loss and emotional breakdown and a tribute to ordinary blessings that made it possible.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-456-1
Page Count: 153
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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