Where There's A Will There's A Way: Or, All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Shakespeare

by Laurie Maguire

Overview

When life becomes one big drama, let history's greatest life coach help you rewrite it. 

Bard expert Laurie Maguire brings her knowledge and love of Shakespeare to bear on the great-and small-challenges that all readers face today. As she illustrates in this witty, accessible, and unique self-help book, all one really needs is Shakespeare when it comes to understanding life. 

Covering such universal subjects as identity, the battle of the sexes, family relationships, love, loss and death, Maguire shows how the dilemmas illustrated in Shakespeare's plays can help readers explore their own emotions and judgments. Together, Maguire and Shakespeare offer suggestions, comfort, empathy, and encouragement as they set out a timeless principle for living. To read Shakespeare is to understand what it means to be human. To read Where There's a Will There's a Way is to better understand how to deal with it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781440621055
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/30/2007
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	518 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Laurie Maguire is a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, where she teaches English literature. She has written numerous articles on Elizabethan drama, women's studies, and theater, and has lectured throughout the United States.

Editorial Reviews

After a year of working through personal, professional, financial, and health issues, Maguire (English, Magdalen Coll., Oxford) became a voracious reader of self-help books. She soon became convinced that much of what she was reading was already familiar to her through the works of William Shakespeare. "I had always known Shakespeare was a cultural icon," she writes. "Now I understood he was a self-help guru." Although Maguire claims that her work is both an introduction to Shakespeare and a self-help book, it performs neither function particularly well. Readers interested in the Bard will come away disappointed by the book's lack of critical depth, while those seeking guidance will almost certainly be underwhelmed by such advice as "Family tensions needn't create a dysfunctional family go home tonight and tell your family that you love them" and "In romantic or work relationships, state what you want. Rather than being upset, your partner will be relieved he doesn't have to read your mind." For an example of a book that successfully fuses literature with self-help, see Alain De Botton's witty and entertaining How Proust Can Change Your Life. An optional purchase for public libraries. William D. Walsh, Georgia State Univ., Atlanta, Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal