Steering by Starlight

Steering by Starlight: Find your Right Life, No Matter What
Martha Beck, Ph.D. (2008, Rodale)


Martha Beck has been reinventing her life for years. She started out an academic, striving by Harvard standards toward two degrees in Psychology. Her first memoir, Expecting Adam, (1999) tells how she was thrown off that career track by the birth of her son, who is severely affected by Down syndrome. Now she's so far from where she was headed then that she imagines the Harvard Psychology Department plotting to repossess her degrees, and she couldn't be happier. A successful author and Life Coach, she still sounds as cheerfully neurotic as Anne Lamott, which is a nice foil to the mysticism inherent in what she's trying to teach. Addressing this directly: "I don't technically believe in magic or miracles; I think everything has a rational explanation. It's just that I've seen many, many events that lie outside the bounds scientific knowledge can explain at the present time."
Amen and hallelujah to that--

July 2008, by email