Her writing isn’t bad but her philosophy is thin, very thin.

The thing in this book that made me think the most is her contention that “Life is not all we once thought it would be.” In that I totally get what she is saying but I’ve always contended that what we once thought was an illusion and the reality is always better than any illusion.

my favorite things from this book:

his mother just made up sh*t exactly like my FIL does . . . and my FIL is not rich and famous! Made me laugh.

And he said something like, “You don’t remember who came to the funeral but you’ll always remember who didn’t.” Yep.

It is slow to get into, and complicated and complex and demanding. But then that is what makes it so good. Gaiman plays with themes that Tom Robbins plays with, except he is darker and not fun. Not fun but fascinating.

It is a book that I’ll no doubt read several times to get all the juice and pulp! Highly recommended.

In a lot of ways I would have liked MORE information. As it is, this book can be summed up thusly: humans are obligate aerobes. So, if something doesn’t get O2 for any reason, the result is death.

His best parts of the book (which is riddled with less good parts in which he advocates his POVs) are his personal family stories. Now, THAT’S the book he should write. How his grandmother died, his mother, his brother—and how this affected him, and how it changed his doctoring, and how do you make real life decisions that acknowledge the inevitability of death that isn’t always pretty? Tell it, describe it for us, don’t preach to us.

Still, very much a book to be read because really, you ARE gonna die. Deal with it.

It was not a good read, and I didn’t even find many interesting stories (I thought it was supposed to have been written by writers!), but it was interesting to look through anyway. And perhaps the most interesting thing was that the government was hiring writers in the Depression. Are we down to that level of uselessness today? Yet?

I very much enjoyed the research he was able to share in this book, but I think his definition of what is “good” is skewed in that he thinks it isn’t good UNLESS it is directly and intentionally social.

sorry, this was just so poorly written it was not worth wading through. Come on people, if you have a story to tell, tell it, don’t torture it!

I say that because . . . well, there were so many reasons not to like this book and yet I did, a lot. I guess most importantly, the guy can write and he has a story to tell and it was unusual and about things I’m generally interested in.

So, what was wrong? First of all, the whole autism thing. I don’t believe in it. But then, he himself admits in one passage that autism (particularly “spectrum”) will likely one day be considered normal, not something in need of treatment. I would add, as it once was.

Second, there were several times in the book that I thought, geez, if someone treated me like they treat their son, I’d be autistic too. What I mean by that is that they just seemed way too condescending (“good talking”) and judgmental (“good talking” again) and concerned about what the “experts” on autism thought. Add to that that my most normal child had some poop issues herself and absolutely would NOT poop in the pot until she was nearly five . . . and their problems just don’t seem that extreme to me.

And third, considering the above two, maybe the kid didn’t need “healed” at all. Ah, but, the family certainly did. Nothing like shamanism to give that to you!

Great adventure, great setting, great descriptions.

maybe because we have such “survivor personalities” in this family anyway, I didn’t find much in the book surprising. But the various survivor stories were a lot of fun. And it was nice to run into the idea of traumatic growth instead of just PTSD—truly what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.

When Eustace showed up in NYC in his buckskins, he was called Daniel-fcking-Boone. My mother used to say to us, “I don’t know why in the world you all want to live that Daniel Boone life.” You could say I felt a connection.

I guess if I just got down to it, I’d say that you have to read this book. Really. But it is complicated for me because the author is a bigot at the beginning of the book and that horribly irritates me. Examples? She describes Eustace’s neighbors as the “aptly named Hicks clan” and goes through this thing about red necks in SW Virginia not knowing where Maine is when clearly it is that they do not give a sht about a man walking from Maine but do care about a man walking to Georgia. I’ve read her other work and she does not engage in such bigotry about Italians, Indians, Balinese, the poverty stricken or uneducated of any area, hell, not even her fairly hated ex-husband . . . just about hillbillies. I am so sick of it being ok to malign hillbillies. Hillbillies are the very last niggers, or at least we are the very last people you can cop derogatory attitudes toward and still be pc and “inclusive”. Then too, there are some simple mistakes that irritate me because they show her ignorance in ways that Eustace would understand—a passive solar office building with room for two work spaces could not possibly be 20 sq. feet (this is like checking out in the supermarket with 3 items that sell for $1/each and the total coming to $13 and you not noticing that something didn’t add up right) but must be 20 feet square. Or that Eustace’s horse is not a Standard Breed but a Standardbred.

So there’s that. Which pretty much disappears after the first one-third of the book. But then in the last one-third of the book she takes on the doctor/counselor role to diagnose our beloved Eustace, to tell us what is wrong with him, when frankly what is wrong with his is just as obvious from his story as what is so right about him. Just tell his goddamn story already.

But, if you can read this book and get past the author, well, Mr. Eustace Conway is a character, a most admirable character. Both perfect and perfectly flawed.

What I really admire about Eustace is that he lives with reality. The author says he’s the only person she knows who doesn’t live in metaphor but is the real deal. Yeah, that. Nature doesn’t say, “let’s reach an agreement here.” With nature, it really is, lots of times, one way or the other. You screw up, you pay the price. I totally get Eustace’s hard-ass-ness. Because nature, and life really, is hard-ass. But life is also forgiving—like the bread is edible even if it isn’t perfect and at least as this author portrays him, he doesn’t quite get that. You don’t want to try to fillet a squirrel but, you know, maybe you can relax on some of the other stuff.

And maybe there is some problem in talking more about your life than you live it. But considering that most people don’t even have a life, considering that most people pay lip service to tons of things without really living any of it, considering that people are not human if they are not in touch with the earth, I think Eustace’s life says quite a lot.