Roland Jenkins

"Living in the Moment" is a biographical book. The author tells stories about his life, his family, things that moved him and inspired him.

I have varied emotions about this book. I loved the first story "Running with the herd". It has a spirit that celebrates nature and that we should stay connected to it. Reading this experience of the author was really fascinating and inspiring.
Unfortunately, after that, the stories didn't reach me.
Maybe I expected something different, maybe it just wasn't the book for me. I do get the feelings of the author, writing down short stories from his life, but the happy ones (about his children, his wife,...) didn't catch me. In a certain way, to which I can't really put words, they didn't seem emotional enough. It was as if the real happiness was missing in the writing.
On the other hand, the sad stories made me really sad. "Dear Mom", "With Pride in My Eyes" and the following stories made my cry like mad. There the emotion was so deep and heartbreaking, I just couldn't hold on to myself. To write about these events must have taken a strong will.

The editing of the book could have been a bit better, too, I think. I did get confused about the time jumps, I often did take nearly half of the story to get my bearings (and since the stories are sometimes only one page long, that is way too much time to know where you are on the timeline). The names of friends and family were not always explained, so it was difficult to know, whom the story was about, or who was speaking.
Jumps between different times in the author's life came without warning.
Those jumps also brought along repetitions. If you've read about one event and then get to hear about it again and again in the next stories, it doesn't really encourage you to read on. If these stories would have been published in a quarterly or so, it would have made sense to do little repeatings. But since you normally will read a book for some time in one sitting, those repetitions were rather hindering.

So, why didn't the happy stories in the book not catch me? I don't know. Maybe I'm too far away from the author's emotional experiences, or maybe it was the editing of the book. I think the stories themselves could be really gripping and emotional (as some of them are), but for me, some of them just weren't. Still, all in all, a good book, which might have been an awesome read if some things had been different.… (more)

I guess I needed to read more of the description of the book before I requested it off of Early Reviewers. I thought it was going to be more of a book on meditation and living in the moment, giving examples of how to do this is life. Instead, the book is an enjoyable collection of stories/essays/reflections on the author's life. While I doubt I have much in common with Mr. Jenkins after reading his book, I will say that I think he captures examples of the simple life quite well, and you can definitely feel the intense love he has for his family. I felt the stores he shared about what it was like for him to be a parent were quite moving. I received this book as an e-book, and I'm hoping that some of the misspelled words and spacing problems were corrected in the print edition. These did not occur that often, but they were always a little jarring when they did.… (more)