Book reviews: ‘Love’s Labor’ and ‘Heartland: A Forgotten Place, an Impossible Dream, and the Miracle of Larry Bird’

‘Love’s Labor: How We Break and Make the Bonds of Love’ by Stephen Grosz

Though Stephen Grosz’s first book was a critically acclaimed best seller in the U.K., said Daphne Merkin in The New York Times, his second “carries more of a depth charge.” Once again, the American-born, London-based psychoanalyst unfurls a series of case studies from his practice with the skill of a short-story writer. But because his subject this time is love, the new case studies add up to “a surpassingly wise investigation of the ways in which we trip ourselves up in the pursuit of our heart’s desires.” Grosz’s central insight about love is that our difficulties with sustaining it arise from each individual’s prior experiences of loss: If you’re not at peace with the losses you’ve endured, including the simple loss of childhood, you may never cease repeating the adolescent habit of heaping too many expectations on love. But reaching full self-understanding takes time, often years. Grosz’s “illuminating” narratives make every search compelling.

In each story, “Grosz is the psychoanalyst-cum-detective, listening for clues until the unconscious forces that are driving his patients’ behavior are made visible,” said Kathy O’Shaughnessy in the Financial Times. One patient who claims to love her fiancé can’t bring herself to mail the couple’s wedding invitations. A married man obsesses over his wife’s underwear because he prefers inconclusive evidence that she’s cheating to strong evidence that might rule out that possibility. Grosz openly admits that he hasn’t always been right in his initial diagnosis of the root of these patients’ hang-ups. But Grosz’s work is all about peeling through layers and seeking to continually see each person’s story anew. Love’s Labor is “categorically not a self-help book.” Instead, it’s “a compressed, brilliant distillation of 40 years of clinical experience and deep thought, written to last.”

“The title refers to Grosz’s belief that the work of love is to learn to see oneself and others clearly,” said Sophie McBain in The Guardian. Of course, that’s “also the work of psychoanalysis and, arguably, of life.” In one of his stories, two of his female friends who are fellow psychoanalysts have a falling-out because one is sleeping with the other’s husband, and the heart of the conflict appears to stem from the women’s differing views of the purpose of both psychoanalysis and life. Grosz aims merely to listen long and well and constructively enough to help his patients gain deeper self-knowledge. “What a privilege it must be to accompany another person so closely as they try to figure out the challenge of living—of change and love, and accepting love and change. And what a privilege it is for the reader to catch a glimpse of this process.”

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‘Heartland: A Forgotten Place, an Impossible Dream, and the Miracle of Larry Bird’ by Keith O’Brien

“More than three decades after his final game, Larry Bird retains a mythopoeic quality,” said Jack McCallum in The Wall Street Journal. The small-town Indiana native was, as early as age 20, basketball’s Great White Hope, and because he happened into a lasting rivalry with the charismatic Magic Johnson, he delivered on that promise, his on-court brilliance helping turn March Madness into a television phenomenon and righting the then-floundering NBA. But as Keith O’Brien’s new book reminds us, Bird’s breakthrough was far from guaranteed. At 20, the future Hall of Famer was also already a divorced college dropout and former garbage collector with a daughter to support. His father had recently died by suicide. Heartland “goes deep” to tell the full, gripping story.

Bird’s story “could have ended before it ever really began,” said Noral Parham in the Indianapolis Recorder. Though he’d been a high school star, young Larry quit Indiana University weeks after joining the school’s powerhouse program because he felt out of place. Fortunately, two coaches at underdog Indiana State didn’t give up on him, and Bird spent the next three seasons helping lift the Sycamores out of obscurity and into a national title showdown with Johnson’s Michigan State that was viewed by 50 million people—still the most ever for a college game. Indiana State was a team built from scraps and one world-class talent from tiny French Lick, said Peter Robert Casey in Slam magazine. O’Brien, though he was unable to secure Bird’s cooperation, “drops you into that world, and the community around Bird, to show just how
unlikely this whole thing really was.”

O’Brien, whose last book was a best seller about Pete Rose, has now written “the definitive chronicle of the Sycamores’ run over the three years that Bird captained the team,” said Edward Banchs in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Of course he learned nothing directly from Bird, who remained press shy throughout his NBA career and subsequent two decades as an NBA coach and team executive. But because O’Brien brings the journey alive, “I found myself cheering for Bird even though I knew how the story ultimately shaped out.”