BRIGHT SHINING

Examination of grace in the wide array of human life.

Australian journalist Baird offers a humanistic, wide-ranging, and generally vague look at “grace.” Her attempt to define the term takes up a page of text and can be summarized in three points: “to be fully, thrillingly alive,” “something undeserved,” and “the ability to see good in the other.” She explores grace from this starting point, not always with great success. Through a panoply of stories about people across the globe, past and present, together with personal anecdotes and quotes from various authors, Baird takes the reader through a few rough categories in which grace is found. These include cycles of life, family and friends, strangers and random encounters, forgiveness, justice, and nature. Finding grace in the author’s rambling prose is not always easy or obvious, however, and even when it is, the lesson learned is not always particularly remarkable. At one point, Baird highlights an exhibition of heartbeats found in Japan, a record of thousands of individuals’ heartbeats. The reader is left wondering whether grace is found in this exhibition, in the lives of those represented, in the care taken in recording these lives, or something else. A particularly odd chapter begins with a focus on Napoleon’s preserved penis, which has been bought and sold many times. The chapter goes on to discuss famous men who have been cruel to women, and the overall point is simply lost on the reader. Following somewhat in the footsteps of Anne Lamott, Baird is candid in style and progressive in viewpoint, but her prose can be cold and unengaging. “The pursuit of awe, wonder and light is one of the driving principles of my life,” she states. However, the reader must squint to find those attributes in this book.

Grand ideas fall flat.