Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is enthralled by exits: long farewells, quick goodbyes, sudden endings, the ordinary and the extraordinary. There’s a relationship, she attests, between small goodbyes and our ability “to master and mark the larger farewells.”
In Exit, her tenth book, she explores the ways we leave one thing and move on to the next; how we anticipate, define, and reflect on our departures; our epiphanies that something is over and done with.
Lawrence-Lightfoot, a sociologist and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has interviewed more than a dozen women and men in states of major change, and she paints their portraits with sympathy and insight: a gay man who finds home and wholeness after coming out; a sixteen-year-old boy forced to leave Iran in the midst of the violent civil war; a Catholic priest who leaves the church he has always been devoted to, he life he has loved, and the work that has been deeply fulfilling; an anthropologist who carefully stages her departure from he “field” after four years of research; and many more.
Too often, Lawrence-Lightfoot believes, we exalt new beginnings t the expense of learning from our goodbyes. Exit finds isdom and perspective in the possibility of moving on and marks the start of a new conversation, to help us discover how we might make our exits with purpose and dignity.
About Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, a MacArthur prize–winning sociologist, is the Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education at Harvard University, where, since 1972, she has studied the culture of families, communities, and schools, and the relationships between human development and social change. She is the author of ten books, including The Third Chapter, Respect, The Essential Conversation, andBalm in Gilead, which won the 1988 Christopher Award for “literary merit and humanitarian achievement.” In 1993, she was awarded Harvard’s George Ledlie Prize for research that makes “the most valuable contribution to science” and is to “the benefit of mankind.” She is the recipient of twenty-eight honorary degrees and is the first African-American woman in Harvard’s history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor.
Editorial Review
Because they have become “signposts of courage and treachery in my life,” the author sensitively plumbs the intricacies of departures with personal resolve. Whether exits portend hope or an entrepreneurial new beginning or reiterate failure and shortcomings, she writes, they are ubiquitous. Most often, smaller exits foreshadow (and groom us for) larger ones to come. Lawrence-Lightfoot draws insights from published source material but most effectively from dozens of interviews with subjects about their exit narratives. Examples: an Iranian CEO who departed his home country for New York City, conflicted by loyalties to his Middle Eastern blood family; a man who abandoned the Catholic priesthood for true love; a gay man whose young exit from the closet introduced a plethora of new concerns and anxieties, but who emerged at 58 remarking how it remains “a gift to be part of a counterculture.” Elsewhere, the dignified retirement from a beloved job and the relentless bullying of an ethnic child prove alternatingly heartbreaking, transformative and elucidating, as do chats with a pragmatic psychotherapist and a physician, who cites medical exits as a “letting go” of the physical body. The resonant testimonials Lawrence-Lightfoot spotlights nicely dovetail into a conclusion befitting her research into the inevitability of departures and our individual choice to accept or bemoan them. – Kirkus Reviews
Marking The Moment With A Meaningful ‘Exit’
NPR Book Review – June 11, 2012 (Excerpt)
Exits are ubiquitous; long or short, grand or modest, we’ve all left something, from resigning from a long-held position to waving goodbye to a friend after lunch. In Exit: The Endings That Set Us Free, author Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot explores endings through the stories of people in transition.
Too often “we tend to ignore and diminish endings,” she writes, while celebrating beginnings. Instead, we should “develop the habit of marking the small goodbyes to help us master the larger farewells.”
NPR’s Neal Conan speaks with Lawrence-Lightfoot about her book and making the most of goodbyes. [Read the full article...]
UnBound: Battle of the Half-Angels
The Nephillim Chronicles – Book One by Ronnie Massey
Justin and Theo are just normal teenagers with their teenage problems, until the day they meet their biological fathers, Michael and Uriel, two of the few remaining archangels. They learn, they are nephillim, the half human offspring of angels, and they learn they are not the only ones. In the days of old, nephillim walked the earth. Now heaven’s misfits may be all that stands between mankind and the wrath of Lucifer and the Fallen. But how will a handful of teenagers react when they find out, not only are they not human, but they are the most powerful soldiers in heaven’s army? How will they deal with their newly found powers? And will they be able to stop Lucifer?
We are the only country that makes guns, including military-style assault weapons, available to anyone who wants to buy them. This is not freedom. It is a tyranny of death and destruction — a tyranny of which the National Rifle Association is proud. The Washington Post
UnBound: Battle of the Half-Angels
