The Review Vista, 281 N Broad Street, Middletown, DE (2026)

09/24/2026

I totally agreeee!

09/24/2026

Katherine May wrote this book during a winter that was not a season.

Her husband became seriously ill. She withdrew her son from school. She stepped back from her own work. And the life she had been running at full speed simply stopped, not through choice exactly but through the specific withdrawal of the conditions that had been keeping it running, and she found herself in the kind of stillness that our culture has no adequate language for because our culture has decided that stillness is the problem rather than the information.

She called it wintering.

The word is the book's central gift, a term for the fallow periods that every life contains and that we consistently misread as failure, as depression, as evidence that something has gone wrong that needs to be immediately corrected and returned to the productive forward motion that we have decided is the only legitimate state for a human being to occupy.

Wintering is not failure.

It is a season.

Not a metaphorical season in the vague inspirational sense. A genuine season with its own requirements and its own gifts and its own specific texture that is different from the texture of the active seasons and that cannot be rushed through into something more comfortable without losing what the winter was trying to offer.

May moves through her own winter and through the winters of other cultures and other traditions and other species with the curious unhurried attention of a writer who has decided that the subject deserves the same quality of presence she is arguing for in the experience itself.

She goes to Finland to swim in frozen lakes.

She reads about bears and their hibernation, the way the body physically transforms in winter, slowing and conserving and withdrawing into itself not from weakness but from the accumulated wisdom of a species that has learned to survive the cold.

She looks at the ways that pre-modern cultures organized themselves around the seasonal rhythms that industrial life has flattened, the darkness and the cold honored rather than overcome, the winter given its due as the necessary counterpart to the growth seasons rather than an obstacle to be managed and medicated into invisibility.

The contemporary resonance is not incidental.

We are living in a culture that has decided that winter is optional, that the fallow period is a malfunction, that the person who needs to slow down and withdraw and stop producing for a while is the person who needs to be fixed rather than the person who is doing what the season requires.

The antidepressant prescription that arrives before the winter has been allowed to deliver what winter delivers. The productivity advice that meets the person who cannot currently produce. The wellness industry that offers to optimize you back into function when what you might need is to stop being functional for a while and find out what the stopping reveals.

May is not anti-medicine and she is not romantic about suffering.

She is specific about the difference between a winter that is doing something and a winter that has become something else, between the fallow period that is preparing the ground for what comes next and the depression that is not a season but a condition that needs clinical attention.

The distinction is not always clear.

She does not pretend it is always clear.

She offers the concept of wintering not as a cure for depression but as a frame for the experiences that are not depression, that are simply the necessary darkness of a full human life, the periods of withdrawal and rest and the particular kind of slow underground work that the productive seasons cannot accommodate.

The writing is the book's greatest achievement, prose that has the quality of the season it is describing, unhurried and specific and willing to sit with things rather than rushing toward the conclusion.

She describes the light in winter with the attention of someone who has learned to love it precisely because it is different from the light of summer, lower and colder and more honest in the way it falls on things, refusing the softening that the long summer evenings provide.

She describes her own gradual return from the winter not as recovery exactly but as the natural movement of a person who has finally given the season what it required and found that the spring came when it came, not because she had optimized her way back to health but because she had honored the darkness long enough to exhaust it.

The spring is not the point of the book.

The winter is the point.

The learning to be inside it without fighting it.

The discovery that the stillness, given time and sufficient willingness to be in it without immediately converting it into productivity, has its own intelligence.

That the dormant things are not dead.

They are preparing.

That the person who needs to winter is not failing at life.

They are doing exactly what the season requires.

And the season, honored rather than overcome, will pass in its own time.

And what comes after the honoring is not what you were before the winter.

It is something that only the winter could have made.

09/24/2026

Eddie dies in the first pages.

He dies the way he lived, which is to say doing his job, maintaining the rides at Ruby Pier amusement park, an old man who has spent most of his adult life at the same place doing the same work and who has carried, beneath the routine of it, the quiet conviction that his life did not amount to much.

He dies trying to save a child.

He is not sure he succeeded.

He arrives in heaven.

And heaven, in Mitch Albom's telling, is not the place of clouds and reunion and the general resolution of everything that the traditional afterlife promises. It is a place where each person must encounter five people from their life, people whose stories intersected with theirs in ways they never fully understood while they were alive, and through those encounters understand the meaning of the life they just finished living.

The structure is elegant and Albom executes it with the storytelling efficiency of a writer who understands that a reader's emotional patience for the afterlife premise is not unlimited and that the five encounters need to arrive with sufficient pace and sufficient weight to justify the architecture.

They arrive.

The Blue Man is the first, a stranger from Eddie's childhood whose death was connected to Eddie's life in a way Eddie never knew and could not have known, and the revelation of the connection is the novel's first statement of its central argument, which is that no life is lived in isolation, that the threads connecting one person's story to another's extend further and in more directions than any single consciousness can track.

We are not separate.

We were never separate.

The consequences of our smallest actions reach further than we can see.

This is either the most comforting argument available or the most terrifying, and Albom is wise enough to let it be both, to show Eddie the ways his life touched other lives with benefit and the ways it touched them with damage, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes through the same act.

The Captain is the encounter that costs Eddie most and gives him most simultaneously, the man from his war years whose decisions and Eddie's intersected in ways that produced the wound Eddie carried in his leg for the rest of his life and the psychological wound he carried alongside it, the sense of something lost that he could never fully name or locate.

The war sections are the novel's most honest and most emotionally complex passages, Albom resisting the easy redemption that the genre of inspirational fiction tends toward and sitting instead with the specific moral complexity of people trying to do right in conditions that make right genuinely difficult to locate.

Ruby is the woman who gives the novel its setting its name and who carries the story that connects the place Eddie spent his life to the larger human stories that preceded his time there, the reminder that every place has a history that the people who inhabit it cannot fully see.

Marguerite is Eddie's wife.

The Marguerite encounter is the one the novel has been building toward in the emotional sense, the reunion that the reader has been wanting since early in the book when her absence was first established, and Albom gives it the weight it deserves without allowing it to resolve everything into a sentimentality that the rest of the novel has been too honest to warrant.

She tells him something about love that the living cannot quite hold and the dead can finally understand.

Love is not lost when the person is lost.

It does not end because the relationship ended.

It goes somewhere else and continues in a form that the living cannot see and the dead, arriving in heaven with the full account of their lives in their hands, finally can.

The fifth person is the most unexpected and the most quietly devastating, the encounter that answers the question Eddie has been carrying since the moment of his death, whether he saved the child, whether the last act of his life meant what he hoped it meant.

Albom answers it with the specific generosity of a writer who understands that the person reading this book is often the person who has been living a life that does not feel like enough, who has been doing the work and showing up and maintaining the rides and wondering whether any of it matters to anyone beyond the immediate practical function.

It matters.

It always mattered.

The people whose lives you touched without knowing you touched them are in heaven waiting to tell you.

The book is openly sentimental and it earns the sentiment across its pages in the way that the best sentimental fiction earns it, by grounding the feeling in specific human detail rather than floating it on abstraction, by giving Eddie a life that is real enough and ordinary enough that the revelation of its significance arrives as genuine surprise rather than inevitable uplift.

Eddie was a maintenance man.

He thought his life was small.

He was wrong in the specific way that most lives are wrong about themselves, underestimating the reach of what they have done and the number of people they have changed simply by being present and doing the work.

The five people know.

They were waiting to tell him.

They are waiting to tell all of us.

09/24/2026

Most decluttering books are afraid of grief.

They will help you sort your kitchen and organize your wardrobe and develop a relationship with your possessions that sparks joy or serves function or reflects your truest self, and they will do all of this while carefully avoiding the thing that makes most of the stuff impossible to let go of in the first place.

The person who is gone.

Matt Paxton is not afraid of grief.

He spent years as the lead organizer on the television show Hoarders, which means he spent years walking into homes where the stuff had become the grief, where a person had lost someone and the losing had produced a relationship with objects so comprehensive and so tangled with love and absence that the home had stopped being livable and the stuff had become the last available form of the person who was no longer there.

He learned things in those homes that the conventional decluttering literature does not know.

The first thing he learned is that the stuff is not the problem.

The stuff is the symptom.

The problem is that nobody taught us how to grieve through objects, how to keep what genuinely carries a person's memory and release what we are keeping out of guilt or obligation or the fear that releasing an object means releasing the person it belonged to.

The fear is understandable.

It is also wrong.

The memory is not in the object.

The memory is in you.

The object is a trigger for the memory but the memory itself lives in your body and your mind and the stories you tell and the way you learned to make coffee from watching her make it and the sound of his laugh that surfaces unexpectedly when something funny happens that he would have found funny too.

None of that leaves when the sweater goes to Goodwill.

Paxton says this with the gentleness of someone who has sat with enough grieving people in enough full rooms to understand that saying it is not sufficient and that the person across from him needs to feel it rather than just know it, and that the feeling takes time and takes the specific work of handling the objects and telling the stories that the objects carry and discovering, in the telling, that the stories survive the releasing.

The methodology he offers is built around story rather than category.

Not does this spark joy. Not have you used this in the last year. Not does this serve a function.

What story does this carry and is there a better way to keep the story than keeping the object.

The wedding dress in the box in the attic that nobody has opened in twenty years is not being kept because anyone is going to wear it or look at it. It is being kept because releasing it feels like releasing the marriage, the mother, the version of the family that the dress belongs to.

Paxton would ask you to take it out of the box.

To look at it.

To tell the story of the day it was worn and who was there and what happened and what it meant.

And then to consider whether the dress needs to stay in the box or whether the story can be kept in a photograph, in a journal entry, in the telling of it to someone who needs to hear it, while the dress itself goes somewhere it might be worn again by someone who needs a dress.

The story survives.

The dress serves a new purpose.

The grief, held in the story rather than the object, becomes something you carry rather than something that has filled your garage.

The sections on what he calls legacy items are the book's most original contribution to the decluttering conversation.

Not everything should go.

Some objects genuinely carry a person in a way that transcends the story, that has a physical presence and a weight that the photograph does not replicate and the journal entry cannot capture. The handwritten recipe card in her actual handwriting. The tool he used every Saturday morning that still smells faintly of the garage. The piece of jewelry that was on her body for forty years and carries that forty years in its weight.

These stay.

The work is learning to tell the difference between what genuinely carries a person and what you are keeping out of the guilt of not keeping it, the obligation to honor by accumulating rather than by remembering, the fear that the person is more gone if the stuff is gone.

Paxton has been in the room with enough families to know the difference looks different for every person and that nobody gets to tell you which objects genuinely carry your people and which ones you are keeping for other reasons.

But he has also been in the room with enough families to know that when you find the objects that genuinely carry your people, when you hold them and feel them and tell the story they carry, something releases that has been held tight for a very long time.

Not the grief.

The weight of the stuff around the grief.

The grief is allowed to be grief again rather than being expressed as square footage.

The person is allowed to be a person again rather than being expressed as boxes.

The memory survives the releasing.

It always survives the releasing.

Paxton has watched it happen in rooms full of stuff that was held in place by love that did not know any other way to hold on.

He is offering another way.

Hold the story.

Let the stuff go.

The person was never in the stuff anyway.

They were always in you.

09/23/2026

Authenticity is the courage to be yourself...0

09/23/2026

The baby does not break the marriage.
The baby reveals it.

Everything that was quietly unresolved between two people before the child arrived, every assumption that was never examined, every expectation that was never spoken, every imbalance that was manageable when there was enough energy and enough goodwill and enough sleep to smooth over the rough edges, surfaces after the baby with the insistence of something that has been waiting for exactly this moment to become impossible to ignore.

The sleep is gone.

The goodwill is running low.

The rough edges are everywhere.

And suddenly the person you chose, the person you were certain about, is standing in the kitchen at eleven in the morning having slept through the six and the seven and the eight o'clock wakings and you are looking at them with a feeling that the word resentment does not fully cover because resentment implies something contained and what you are feeling is considerably larger than contained.

Jancee Dunn knows this feeling from the inside.

She was in a therapist's office screaming about it.

She is a journalist and she writes about it with the specific combination of personal honesty and research discipline that makes this book more useful than a memoir and more honest than a self-help book.

The research she brings in is not decoration.

The Gottman Institute's findings on contempt as the primary predictor of marital collapse is the book's most important piece of evidence and the one that reframes everything else. Not conflict. Not anger. Not the screaming in the therapist's office. Contempt, the shift from frustration with what your partner does to a fundamental dismissiveness toward who your partner is, is the thing that ends marriages.

And new parenthood, with its exhaustion and its unequal distribution of invisible labor and its complete reorganization of two people's lives around a third person who cannot yet acknowledge anyone else's needs, is the most reliable contempt incubator available.

The invisible labor is the book's central subject and the place where Dunn names something that has been happening in households since households existed and has only recently acquired sufficient language for the people carrying it to describe it to the people who are not.

The mental load.

Not the tasks. The knowledge of the tasks. The continuous background processing of what needs to happen, when it needs to happen, who needs to do it, what happens if it does not get done. The pediatrician appointment and the school form and the birthday present for the party on Saturday and whether the babysitter knows about the allergy and which child needs new shoes by when.

This processing happens in one person's mind.

The other person experiences the absence of this processing as the tasks simply not existing.

He did not know the appointment needed to be made.

She has known for three weeks.

He is not lying about not knowing.

The not knowing is the problem.

Dunn describes her own contribution to the dynamic with the honesty that separates this book from the genre of marital grievance literature that assigns all the fault to the partner and none to the person writing. She describes her perfectionism, the way she criticized how Tom did things rather than accepting an imperfect version of help, the way she trained him out of participation through the consistent message that his participation was insufficient.

She wanted help.

She made help feel impossible.

Both of these things were true simultaneously.

This is uncomfortable to read if you recognize yourself in it.

It is also, precisely because it is uncomfortable, the most useful thing the book offers.

The practical solutions Dunn arrives at are genuinely practical in the unglamorous way that actual solutions to actual problems tend to be. Specific ownership of specific tasks rather than the vague shared responsibility that produces the endless negotiation about who is going to do the thing that both people can see needs doing. The division made explicit, spoken aloud, agreed upon, revisited when it stops working.

The Gottman five to one ratio, the finding that it takes five positive interactions to balance one negative one, applied to the specific texture of daily life with small children, where the negative interactions accumulate with remarkable efficiency.

The permission to be imperfect at the fixing.

Because the fixing is not a destination. It is a practice. A daily recommitment to the person you chose in the conditions that the choosing produced, which are not the conditions you imagined when you were choosing and are considerably more demanding and considerably more revealing of who you both actually are.

Dunn and Tom get better.

Not fixed. Better.

The distinction matters because better is what is actually available and fixed is what people expect and the gap between expectation and reality is where the contempt begins.

Better is enough.

Better is the whole of what love can do in the conditions that love actually operates in.

Which are not the conditions of the beginning.

Which are these conditions.

The screaming in the therapist's office.

The baby who finally slept.

The kitchen at eleven in the morning.

The person you are still choosing.

09/23/2026

Something has shifted in the relationship between parents and children and Leonard Sax has spent his career as a family physician and psychologist watching the shift happen in his consulting room one family at a time.

The shift is this.

Parents are increasingly unwilling or unable to be the authority in their children's lives, and the vacancy left by that withdrawal has been filled, comprehensively and consequentially, by peers and screens and the culture those peers and screens produce.

The child who used to look to the parent to understand what is good and what is worth wanting and who they should become is now looking at a twelve year old on TikTok.

The twelve year old on TikTok does not know.

Sax is not a nostalgist. He is not arguing for the return of the authoritarian parent who rules through fear and whose word is law because it is law. He is making a more specific and more uncomfortable argument, that the overcorrection away from authoritarianism has produced a generation of parents who have confused authority with authoritarianism, who have decided that the respectful relationship with a child is the relationship in which the parent never says no with conviction, never imposes a standard the child did not choose, never insists on something the child resists.

This confusion, he argues, is not kindness.

It is abdication.

The child who has no experience of a loving adult saying this is not acceptable, we do not behave this way, this is the standard we hold ourselves to, is a child who has not been given the most fundamental thing a parent can give.

A culture to belong to.

Not the dominant culture. Not the peer culture. The family culture, the specific set of values and expectations and ways of being in the world that a particular family has decided matters and that it transmits to its children through the daily practice of insisting on it.

The obesity data opens the book and it is more pointed than it first appears.

American children are heavier than they have ever been not primarily because of food access or genetics but because of the collapse of parental authority around food, the unwillingness of parents to say we eat vegetables at this table, we do not eat in front of screens, we sit together and we eat what is made.

The authority around food is the same authority that operates in every other domain.

When it goes in one place it tends to go in all of them.

The sections on anxiety and depression are where the book becomes most relevant to the contemporary moment because Sax was writing in 2015 and the decade since has provided considerable evidence for his central argument.

Rates of anxiety and depression among children and adolescents have risen with a consistency that correlates more closely with the rise of smartphone use and the decline of parental authority than with any other variable, and what Sax was warning about has arrived with a thoroughness that makes the book read, a decade later, as prophecy rather than prediction.

He is not anti-technology in the simple Luddite sense.

He is specific about what the technology is doing, which is providing an alternative to the family culture that parents have stopped defending with sufficient conviction to make the defense stick.

The child who would have turned to the parent for the answer to who am I and what matters is now turning to a peer group mediated by algorithms designed to maximize engagement rather than human flourishing.

The algorithms are winning.

Not because they are more compelling than good parents.

Because too many good parents have stopped competing.

The practical sections of the book are where Sax is most useful and most direct.

Eat dinner together. Not occasionally. As close to every night as your life permits. The research on family dinners is unambiguous and he cites it without apology, the children who eat with their families regularly are doing better by almost every measure than the children who do not.

Prioritize your child's relationship with you over their relationship with their peers. Not by isolating them but by being the more interesting and more trustworthy presence in their life, which requires being present, which requires putting down the phone, which requires the parent to model the very relationship with technology they want their child to have.

Teach them to do hard things. Not to be cruel but because the capacity to tolerate difficulty, to stay with something that is uncomfortable until it becomes less uncomfortable, is the foundation of the resilience that the anxiety epidemic is eroding.

Hold the standard.

Not rigidly. Not without warmth. But hold it.

Because the child who has never had a standard held for them has never been told by the person who loves them most that they are capable of meeting one.

And that telling, it turns out, is one of the most important things a parent can do.

The book is not comfortable reading for the parent who has been operating on the philosophy that the child's happiness in the immediate moment is the highest available goal.

Sax is saying that happiness in the immediate moment and flourishing across a lifetime are not the same goal and sometimes they actively conflict, and that the parent who cannot tolerate their child's temporary unhappiness is the parent who is making a long-term decision in the service of a short-term feeling.

The short-term feeling is the parent's, not the child's.

The child needs the standard.

They need the dinner table.

They need someone who loves them enough to say no with conviction and mean it.

They need a parent who is willing to be the authority.

Not the friend.

The parent.

09/23/2026

Paul Kalanithi was thirty six years old and finishing his neurosurgery residency when he was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.

He had spent his entire adult life preparing to save other people's lives. He had gone to Stanford for literature before going to Stanford for medicine because he understood, from very early, that the questions he most needed to answer were not purely scientific. What makes a life meaningful. What does it mean to be a person. What is the relationship between the brain, which he was training to operate on, and the self that the brain somehow produces.

He wanted to answer these questions as a doctor and as a writer simultaneously.

He did not expect to answer them as a patient.

The diagnosis arrived and everything rearranged itself overnight. The man who had been learning to tell other people how long they had left was now being told how long he had left, and the telling was not precise in the way he had hoped when he was on the other side of the conversation, was not a number or a timeline but a probability distribution, a range of futures narrowing toward one outcome.

He started writing.

Not instead of medicine. He went back to the operating room after the diagnosis, continued neurosurgery through the treatment, because he had understood something from years of working with dying patients that the diagnosis now confirmed from the inside.

The question of how to spend the time you have is not answered by stopping.

It is answered by understanding what matters enough to continue.

For Kalanithi, two things mattered enough.

The patients. The page.

The book he produced from the time between the diagnosis and his death is one of the most honest accounts of dying ever written by someone in the middle of it, and the honesty has a specific quality that is different from the honesty of memoir written in retrospect, written from the safe distance of survival and recovery.

He is not looking back.

He is in it.

The literary sensibility runs through every page with the specific quality of a writer who trained on Eliot and Beckett and Montaigne and who brings that training to the most personal subject available, the approaching end of his own life, without allowing the literary sensibility to become a form of distance from the experience.

He stays close.

The medical sections are where the book does something no other dying memoir quite manages, rendering the experience of being a patient through the consciousness of someone who has been on both sides of the clinical relationship and understands both sides with professional precision.

He knows what the scans mean.

He knows what the doctors are not saying when they are being careful.

He knows the statistics and he knows what the statistics cannot tell him, which is the specific shape of his specific future, and the gap between statistical probability and individual experience is where he lives for the remainder of the book, in the specific uncertainty of a man who knows too much to be comforted by ignorance and not enough to be certain of anything.

His wife Lucy is present throughout and the marriage is rendered with the honesty of two people negotiating an impossible situation with the specific love that impossible situations reveal rather than produce.

They decide to have a child.

Not from denial. From the understanding that the life worth living is the life fully committed to, that pulling back from the future because the future is uncertain is not wisdom but its absence.

Their daughter Cady is born.

Kalanithi holds her.

He writes to her, in the book's most devastating passage, knowing she will not remember him, knowing the only way he can be present in her life is through these pages, through the words that will outlast him and reach her when she is old enough to receive them.

He tells her what he wanted for her.

He tells her what he found the life to be worth.

He tells her that he cannot know who she will be when she reads this but that he loved her before he could know.

He died eight months after Cady was born.

Lucy wrote the epilogue.

The epilogue is the most composed and most quietly heartbreaking piece of writing in a book full of composed and quietly heartbreaking writing, a wife describing the last weeks of her husband's life with the specific restraint of someone who has decided that the facts, plainly stated, are sufficient.

They are sufficient.

They are more than sufficient.

The book ends and you put it down and you sit with it in the specific way that certain books require you to sit with them before you return to the ordinary world, before you pick up your phone or think about what to make for dinner or continue with the day.

Kalanithi wanted to know what made a life meaningful.

He found out.

Not in the way he expected, not through the long career of the neurosurgeon-writer he had imagined for himself, but through the specific compression of the time he had, through the diagnosis that forced the question from the theoretical into the immediate and required an answer that could be lived rather than merely argued.

The answer he found was this.

That meaning is not waiting for you at the end of the doing.

It is in the doing itself.

In the operating room and the page and the daughter you hold knowing you will not see her grow.

It is in the breath that is still breath before it becomes something else.

He breathed.

He wrote.

He left the writing.

It is still breathing.

The Review Vista

09/24/2026

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