A Studs Terkellike approach—brief, topically organized excerpts from many interviews—on the experience of losing a parent as a child or adolescent. Simon (Women's Studies/City College of San Francisco) and Drantell (a San Franciscobased writer and book editor) are best here in an introductory chapter and ``coda'' that relate reactions to their own childhood and adolescent losses (Simon, a father at age 17; Drantell, a mother at age 11) and emotional journeys in compiling the material for this book. Their 70 interviewees cover an impressive cross-cultural and inter-generational range, and yield some fascinating insights about how not only the subjects, but also the surviving parent, siblings, other relatives, peers, and neighbors, reacted to such a cataclysmic loss. For example, a 61-year-old man who lost his mother and father two years apart in the early 1950s recalls, ``There was no discussion of grieving. . . . I was just a working-class kid. We didn't talk, we stuffed it in.'' Conversely, other interviewees, particularly those who came of age after about 1965, feel that the experience of early parental loss could be talked about, and also that it matured and deepened them emotionally; as one woman in her 30s put it, her father's death when she was 11 ``made me more open to life, made me want to take it on more fully. Because you touch something that's in the marrow. You cut through a lot of superficiality and are more sensitive to things.'' In general, however, the panoramic approach that Terkel applied to sweeping historical events such as the Depression and WW II doesn't work as well for an experience as highly personal as a parent's death. Here, the reader needs to be introduced to both the deceased parent and the interviewee in greater depth than the several short excerpts from a far longer interview provided here. (The reader also learns only about the interviewees' first name, current age, and age when they lost a parent; inexplicably, only those who are writers or otherwise artists are identified by their profession or vocation.) In addition, the authors see fit to provide brief general comments as an introduction to each topical subsection; unfortunately, their words are rarely illuminating and at times hackneyed (e.g., ``As grown-up orphans, if we know one thing, we know death is inevitable. At different times in our lives, we experience the inevitability differently''). Largely because of its methodology, Simon and Drantell's mosaic oral history ultimately lacks sufficient reflective or imaginative depth and emotional force. However, it should prove comforting and perhaps helpful to those who have lost, or are about to lose, a parent in childhood or adolescence, as well as to their immediate relatives.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-81319-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
An intriguing approach to identifying and relating to one’s emotions.
An analysis of our emotions and the skills required to understand them.
We all have emotions, but how many of us have the vocabulary to accurately describe our experiences or to understand how our emotions affect the way we act? In this guide to help readers with their emotions, Brackett, the founding director of Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence, presents a five-step method he calls R.U.L.E.R.: We need to recognize our emotions, understand what has caused them, be able to label them with precise terms and descriptions, know how to safely and effectively express them, and be able to regulate them in productive ways. The author walks readers through each step and provides an intriguing tool to use to help identify a specific emotion. Brackett introduces a four-square grid called a Mood Meter, which allows one to define where an emotion falls based on pleasantness and energy. He also uses four colors for each quadrant: yellow for high pleasantness and high energy, red for low pleasantness and high energy, green for high pleasantness and low energy, and blue for low pleasantness and low energy. The idea is to identify where an emotion lies in this grid in order to put the R.U.L.E.R. method to good use. The author’s research is wide-ranging, and his interweaving of his personal story with the data helps make the book less academic and more accessible to general readers. It’s particularly useful for parents and teachers who want to help children learn to handle difficult emotions so that they can thrive rather than be overwhelmed by them. The author’s system will also find use in the workplace. “Emotions are the most powerful force inside the workplace—as they are in every human endeavor,” writes Brackett. “They influence everything from leadership effectiveness to building and maintaining complex relationships, from innovation to customer relations.”
An intriguing approach to identifying and relating to one’s emotions.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-21284-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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