A book that provides illuminating ways to make headway through the days when there doesn't seem to be a way forward.
A memoir of the loss of a husband and finding a path forward beyond the grieving process.
Sandberg (Lean In for Graduates: With New Chapters by Experts, Including Find Your First Job, Negotiate Your Salary, and Own Who You Are, 2014, etc.) was living a life with all of the fulfillments one could hope for. After a comfortable upbringing and education at Harvard, she worked her way up to become a vice president at Google and eventually the COO of Facebook. She presented a popular TED talk and then wrote a book on her "lean in" conceptualization of women in the workplace. However, no amount of professional accomplishment could prepare her for the sudden passing of her husband, Dave, in 2015, after which she had to figure out how to carry on as a mother of two and make the shattered pieces fit back together. This moving book is the result. Writing with Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, 2016, etc.), a highly rated professor at Wharton, Sandberg explores how to weather the storm of grief, applying concrete skills in addition to more complex theories of psychology about how to find meaning in life-changing circumstances. Going deeper and broader than the commonly understood stages of grief, the authors look at different factors that can stunt recovery after a loss—e.g., self-blame and the fear that the loss will permeate every aspect of life indefinitely. Sandberg shows her struggle with finding a comfort level regarding the sharing of her emotional status and learning when to push the level as well as when to respect it. The challenges of moving forward are immense beyond understanding for anyone outside of the experience; this accounting of Sandberg’s resilience does for the process of grieving what her previous work has done for women in the workplace.
A book that provides illuminating ways to make headway through the days when there doesn't seem to be a way forward.Pub Date: April 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3268-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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