A sensitive search for comfort and reason following a daughter's death by fire. Crider's only child, Gretchen, away at college, died from smoke inhalation and burns when her room caught fire. This is Crider's attempt to come to terms with that tragedy and to bring solace to others who cannot find any in church or other recognized forms of spirituality. His meditation takes the form of a yearlong diary beginning a month after Gretchen's death, which has left him ``dazed, hurt, and afraid.'' Time and again, he reviews the circumstances of her death and the ways in which he might have prevented it. Not religious or even a believer in a supreme being, he tries virtually anything that is recommended, from support groups to New Age therapies, but so consuming and unrelenting is his grief that it may (according to his psychologist) even have triggered multiple sclerosis in him. Questions—why? and why me?—emerge in ``the whiny . . . tone of a child'' thwarted in its demands. Reading omnivorously, he takes what comfort he can from sources as disparate as Shakespeare (Macbeth is the source of the book's title), Buddhism, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Khalil Gibran, the Mahabharata, and an Oglala Sioux holy man. Seasons pass. Hiking, gardening, and lugging and fitting rocks to build a wall with no practical purpose connect him with both nature's beauty and its disinterest in the concerns of humans. But spurred by memories and daily reminders of his daughter, he still ``questions the rightness and reality of Gretchen's death.'' At last, he no longer fights against ``unreason'' and says, ``This may be defeat, but it feels more like liberation.'' A narrative filled with pain, anger, and resentment that, with the help of poets and sages, gradually gives way to sorrowful acceptance—and may teach others how to do the same.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-56512-116-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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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