Braving the Wilderness

This book was a difficult read for me. I wrote a long review and then was so frustrated when there was an error in posting it.

I think that Brené Brown's editor (Ben Greenberg) might be to blame for my biggest frustration, unless of course she wrote STET next to it. This simile pissed me off: “It's not just global and domestic terrorism that embeds fear in our cultures. Pervasive, random gun violence, and systematic attacks against groups of people, and the growing vitriol on social media— all of these send fear, like hot lava, flowing across our communities, filling in the holes and eventually working to ravage already fragile and broken places.”
That's not how lava works, when lava fills in holes it fixes the hole; it fills it in and when it cools it become sediment. This is an antithesis to her intended point; it baffles me.

I disliked the biographic technique she used to write it (although a few members of my book club appreciated it), as I found it to be somewhat kind of manipulative and unbelievable (such as her story about not being accepted to the drill team; I'm not into sports and even I know you at least wear school colors to your tryout, then she says her dad was captain of his football team and her mom was a cheerleader). I did like her story about pulling over when learning about the Challenger explosion, however I would have found it more interesting had she cited an additional source rather than just her anecdotal experience. I looked up what she described and found a few newspaper articles that corroborated her story.

She never comes out and says it, but this book is about America, she only uses American examples.

I did like the concept of “give yourself permission”.