LifeSpeak – A Family Legacy

LifeSpeak: A Family Legacy is a memoir on the generations prior to the author Dr. Gregory Steinberg, as well as his own life from beginning to middle. The voice that comes through is direct, informative and punches through with just the right amount of humor around familial situations that will have the reader commiserating and nodding their heads along with him. However, with the humor comes poignant moments that will affect the reader in the most intensive of ways. Dr. Steinberg touches the reader with such a delicate balance of both worlds of emotion that the book is hard to put down, his ability to fully enwrap the audience is second to none. An excerpt to prove this skill, “…was suffering from the final ravages of alcoholism and poverty, and looked “like a faded photograph.”

The information within the pages is like no history book most Americans have come across. There is so much that isn’t known about the world outside of the United States, that when, finally, a glimpse of the truth outside of it is shown, it can set the mind on fire to a degree. LifeSpeak: A Family Legacy was written for the benefit of the author’s children, so that they might have a sense of knowing where it was that they came from and specifically who it was that they came from and what their lives were like—to bring faces no longer on the physical plane back to life so that they might live again in the minds of their future generations. This is perhaps the noblest reason there is to publish a book. Although the book is fairly on the shorter side when it comes to memoirs, at 163 pages, it still captures the lives of a family and gives us just enough to know exactly what this family was like. The ending, in particular, got a fierce physical response from me, ending in a way that I didn’t really see happening, but also finishing in a way that worked perfectly, that it couldn’t have ended by any other means. This book is more geared toward adults, but my thought is that any person of any age would be able to grasp the reasoning behind why this book was created and will gravitate to it just for those purposes alone. It may, in fact, spur others to want to do the same for their own children and those of their future generations to come.