Bright shining How grace changes everything

Review by Booklist Review

Australian journalist and broadcaster Baird follows her acclaimed memoir, Phosphorescence (2020), with this thoughtful investigation of grace, supplementing its traditional Christian definition (God's unmerited favor) and expanding it to our interpersonal interactions. Incorporating being kind, listening to one another, and recognizing the humanity in each other as aspects of grace, she delves into the benefits of extending grace to others: improved emotional, psychological, and even physical health. Baird notes that seeing acts of grace is contagious, inspiring observers to offer it, and opines that society could be enriched by modeling grace. Grace leads Baird to explore forgiveness--especially as a release for trauma survivors--and restorative justice and its role in healing. She contends that nature redirects us to awe, revitalizing us and reminding us of life's uncertainty, and laments that a young device-dependent generation may be losing sight of nature's healing power. In an increasingly isolated world, our innate longing for human contact will only be met with grace and forgiveness. This beautiful work will resonate with fans of Anne Lamott and Shauna Niequist.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Grace is hiding in plain sight, writes Baird (Phosphorescence) in this effervescent outing. While undergoing cancer treatment during the pandemic, Baird embarked on a search for the phenomenon--which she describes as a fleeting, hard-to-define instance of "undeserved" beauty, kindness, or clarity--and found it in unexpected places: swimming with whale sharks in Australia, the small kindnesses of nurses at treatment appointments, and seeing a luminous pink moon the night after her mother died, which put the author in mind of her mother's "presence... gentle and strong." Taking a broader perspective on grace, Baird describes how Australian First Nations members invited Australians to join a "makarrata"--a "coming together after a struggle"--and how some grieving families forgive their loved one's killers despite the almost unimaginable pain involved (Danny Abdallah, whose three kids were killed by a drunk driver in 2020, notes that "forgiveness is not a single action... it has been more than two years and I must choose to forgive myself and the driver every day--to not retreat into hatred"). Baird's ability to find wonder in the everyday is especially poignant, as when she considers the donor who made a blood transfusion she received after a surgery possible: "When I came to, I felt stronger, and I wondered whose blood it was that was now racing through my veins, injecting me with life." Even cynics will be moved. (Oct.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Examination of grace in the wide array of human life. Australian journalist Baird offers a humanistic, wide-ranging, and generally vague look at "grace." Her attempt to define the term takes up a page of text and can be summarized in three points: "to be fully, thrillingly alive," "something undeserved," and "the ability to see good in the other." She explores grace from this starting point, not always with great success. Through a panoply of stories about people across the globe, past and present, together with personal anecdotes and quotes from various authors, Baird takes the reader through a few rough categories in which grace is found. These include cycles of life, family and friends, strangers and random encounters, forgiveness, justice, and nature. Finding grace in the author's rambling prose is not always easy or obvious, however, and even when it is, the lesson learned is not always particularly remarkable. At one point, Baird highlights an exhibition of heartbeats found in Japan, a record of thousands of individuals' heartbeats. The reader is left wondering whether grace is found in this exhibition, in the lives of those represented, in the care taken in recording these lives, or something else. A particularly odd chapter begins with a focus on Napoleon's preserved penis, which has been bought and sold many times. The chapter goes on to discuss famous men who have been cruel to women, and the overall point is simply lost on the reader. Following somewhat in the footsteps of Anne Lamott, Baird is candid in style and progressive in viewpoint, but her prose can be cold and unengaging. "The pursuit of awe, wonder and light is one of the driving principles of my life," she states. However, the reader must squint to find those attributes in this book. Grand ideas fall flat. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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