A personal story about traveling a long road to empowerment and self-sufficiency.
One woman recounts her rags-to-riches journey.
Pizano grew up poor in a tough South Side Chicago neighborhood, and eventually became an unhappy trophy wife before becoming a confident, self-sufficient woman with her own entertainment company. Her early years were spent surrounded by strong, loving family members who taught her to always try to find her “yes” in whatever she wanted to pursue. Her first lesson, she says, came after hearing her mother speak of sexual molestation she endured as a child—an event that eventually prompted her mother to start a nonprofit to help missing and abused children. Pizano’s mother told her that when something bad happens, one has two choices: play the victim, or do something about it. During her nomadic life with her mother, Pizano had her own share of challenges, including a very serious motorcycle accident that derailed her plan to become a model in California. It set her on a path to the financial industry and the man she would eventually marry. However, she says, she found that her husband’s family expressed little love or empathy—a burden that she had to bear in her own marriage. She relates how she fought to keep her sense of self as she became an isolated woman—a situation that only worsened with a move to Memphis. Using the stiletto as a metaphor for finding one’s voice, courage, and perseverance through tough, emotional times, Pizano effectively writes of her difficult life in this memoir. She recounts her journey in a straightforward manner throughout, and readers who have been through similar situations, such as a difficult divorce or sharing custody, may find her story relatable. Some of the sections in this book read more like diary entries, such as late chapters regarding her business dealings. Overall, however, it’s an intriguing, motivational memoir that may assist others as they attempt to regain their own power.
A personal story about traveling a long road to empowerment and self-sufficiency.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4525-8668-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
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
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
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