Resilience

Here’s the last in my depressive reading list; a book about resilience by Anne Deveson, which of course is about bouncing back after adversity, but can’t help really be about adversity, all the different kinds. There’s Rwanda and Ethiopa, the Holocaust, human rights abuses in Turkey and South America, the Stolen Generation, child abuse, homelessness, mental illness, disability . .. and then how people managed to rise above them. Throughout the whole story is another, her own – not only the story of her son with schizophrenia from her earlier book, Tell Me I’m Here (which I must have read fifteen years ago) – but also the story of a man she met through writing this current book, fell in love with, and who died six months later in her presence from cancer. It was inspiring to hear of sixty-somethings falling in love, but weird to have it turned into an example for her book – such intimacy, but I suppose that’s what journalists do. While this was a very interesting book, full of quotes, it did lack depth and it did lack real critical discussion, perhaps because it wasn’t written by a philosopher, just by a journalist who has taken a lot of different examples. It’s about the level of a long article in the Good Weekend, but still a great read, unless you’ve just read the long litany of woes beneath. I really need to find a comedy next.