A plainspoken account that will appeal to anyone who’s interested in the experience of living with Parkinson’s disease.
King (Walking the Crooked Path, 2014) blends pragmatic realism, Christian faith, and an irrepressible sense of humor in his second motivational memoir.
Parkinson’s disease is an incurable affliction of the central nervous system that affects movement, often causing tremors, among other symptoms, and King’s memoir offers a look into the everyday life of someone who suffers from it. In a series of short essays, the author, who was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s at 47, shares stories that show how his outlook has evolved due to his day-to-day experience of living with his disease. He writes that his life often feels like an ongoing battle to maintain simple pleasures for as long as he can: “With God’s help and the support of family and friends, I intend to live in defiance of Parkinson’s disease,” he writes. “It can’t have me; I claim victory.” He often tries to find a balance between being cautious and not giving things up too early; he tells of arguing with his wife over whether he should still be driving a car, for example. He also relates that his inability to pursue certain hobbies, such as scuba diving and skiing, have sometimes contributed to a sense of losing his independence. Overall, King’s tone is conversational and realistic, but he’s also optimistic and often cracks jokes. In this regard, the book may be particularly valuable to Parkinson’s sufferers and readers who know them, although others will find it to be informative as well. Readers may wish that some of the chapters were longer and that they were fleshed out with a little more detail and structure. The good-natured humor, though, sometimes makes up for this lack of a clear narrative arc.
A plainspoken account that will appeal to anyone who’s interested in the experience of living with Parkinson’s disease.Pub Date: May 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5329-7157-0
Page Count: 108
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2017
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
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
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