A vivid, well-paced account of one man’s winding personal journey.
Gebhart (Deere is Right Here!, 2016, etc.) offers a memoir about his lifelong struggle with mental illness and his reflections on a higher power.
In 1965, when the author was in fifth grade, he first began to experience mood swings. These would prove to be mostly harmless to other people; the author recalls a time in gym class, for instance, when he “started calling my classmates ‘quacker buns’ and laughing uncontrollably.” But they were indications of trouble to come. After high school, he made his way to Swarthmore College, and in his sophomore year he began to understand more about his condition: “I came to realize that I would have one semester up on a manic swing and one semester down on a depressive swing.” In subsequent years, the author would earn an MBA, get married, live in various places, and have and lose a number of jobs, including postions as a substitute teacher and an oil-refinery chemist. He also suffered a number of nervous breakdowns. Looking back on it all, though, he seems to harbor no bitterness about his life: “I may have lost many jobs and have no career at all, but I believe that this serves God’s purpose,” he says, and his book concludes with his thoughts on Scripture and the universe. Overall, the book presents a nuanced and candid account of his various experiences. At just over 100 pages, it’s a swift story, but the author’s interjections of specific details give it a very personal feel. For example, he notes that one of his manic episodes resulted in him getting fired because his employer “just did not understand my behaviors which involved a lot of my swearing at my co-workers.” Many incidents in the book are movingly sad, as well. However, readers will come away, in the end, with an understanding that it’s only through difficulty that one can hope to find purpose.
A vivid, well-paced account of one man’s winding personal journey.Pub Date: March 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5446-3123-3
Page Count: 116
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
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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
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