Warm and wise.
A collection of soul-searching reflections by a woman coming to terms with the three major challenges of midlife: change, loss and death.
After sending her troubled youngest son to boarding school to pull himself together again, writer and editor Kenison suddenly realized that her life "as a mother of children at home" was over. All she had so painstakingly built in the first half of her life was starting to come apart. But rather than succumb to despair, the author decided to turn her focus inward and use the opportunity to begin what mythologist Joseph Campbell called "the hero's journey.” Campbell's archetype was based in male experience, but it was still a useful starting point for Kenison, who speaks directly about the transformational midlife experiences that are unique to women—e.g., menopause. As she dealt with the physical "depletion[s]" of aging, the unaccustomed silence of an empty home and the sometimes-uncomfortable shifts in her marriage, she also had to cope with a close friend's terminal-cancer diagnosis. It was yet another rite of initiation along a new, unmarked path. While mourning for her friend, Kenison began to understand the power of gratitude and take even more profound pleasure in everything she had ever taken for granted, from "a night of peaceful sleep" to "[her] husband's embrace." She also realized that in loss was a freedom that would allow her to explore meaningful ways to experience life. No longer bound to the hearth, she immersed herself in the practice of yoga at a training center away from her home, and she learned the healing art of reiki, which allowed her to connect more deeply with others around her.
Warm and wise.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0723-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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