Kirstiecat | Blog

By Po Bronson

I go through almost bipolar like swings with my love for people. At times, I will just basically love every person I am surrounded by and even complete strangers. It’s like I just instantly see The Good in Everyone (that’s an intentional Sloan referece, just in case you were wondering) I absolutely just love people. I can’t get enough of them. I want to let complete strangers tell me their life stories. I want to embrace them. I see their struggles and I realize we all have this wonderful human connection.

But then, it will swing back again and I see so much of the bad and I despise the way people are selfish, don’t spend enough time with their children, value only money. I’ll despise my own self as well and feel really at odds with the world.

Overall, though, I’d like to think I’m a lover not a fighter. This book definitely pushes one more towards the lover of humanity category. For all of our downfalls, we are resilient creatures and reading these indiviual stories (a bit like hearing a really detailed This American Life about overcoming struggles) made me appreciate all of our different ways of coping with tragedies and making decisions. I do think I am perhaps too young for this book in the sense that I have not struggled nearly as much as most of the nonfictional characters but at the same time, i felt I really learned something about people by reading it. Each story is very diverse with Po Bronson covering many different metropolitan as well as rural areas of the United States in addition to a story set in Ireland and one set in London. The ethnicity of the protagonists is also varied, which I think really adds an essential component to the book as a whole because of the way people of different cultures cope with loss, family struggles, illness, divorce, etc.

Po also adds a bit of autobiographical information but not so much that it is too cumbersome for the book as a whole and not to take away from recognizing the stories of the individual he too is trying to learn from. Ultimately, I’d recommend this book for anyone who is really trying to learn how to cope with an issue involving family or a personal loss but I’d also say you’d enjoy reading it even if you just want to learn about people and why we are the way we are. This book is a success because it able to answer it’s posing question: Why Do I Love These People? Well, because they have pulled through and are, in a sense, amazing. They can inspire all of us to be amazing too.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 25th, 2006 at 11:57 am and is filed under books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.