Compassionate, practical, and sensible advice for grieving spouses.
Wyman offers an account of a shocking topic and offers advice to those in similar situations.
In 2020, the author writes, she had a minor argument with her husband, Shawn, about the amount of time he was spending with friends; afterward, he drove from their Colorado home into the mountains, where he shot himself. In texts and social-media postings, he had asked for forgiveness and emphasized his love for the author and others. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the author experienced a painful funeral and veteran’s ceremony (Shawn had formerly been in the U.S. Navy) under burdensome Covid-19 pandemic restrictions, and a breakdown in relations with Shawn’s family. Alexandra also had to adjust to raising her toddler son as a single mother. Over the course of her narrative, she offers numerous asides to inform and comfort readers in similar straits, providing advice and hard lessons learned. She counsels those whose loved ones have committed suicide to “Ride the crazy waves until [the healing process] comes” and recommends taking time for themselves, including guilt-free self-care (yoga was a benefit for her, she says), therapy, focusing on positives, and not falling into the trap of believing one will never move forward. This is a brief, conversational work with short chapters that are sometimes only a few paragraphs in length. She draws on the work of a few other authors, including Nora McInerny and Debbie Ford, to offer further expertise on grief. Most of Wyman’s own material is anecdotal, backed up by commonsense recommendations. An appendix featuring practical financial advice and tips for getting one’s household affairs in order is both helpful and poignant.
Compassionate, practical, and sensible advice for grieving spouses.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2022
ISBN: 9781544533797
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Houndstooth Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2023
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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