Review of Tell Me The Truest Thing You Know

[Michael Valentine]

[Following is an official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Tell Me The Truest Thing You Know" by Dan O'Hare.]

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3 out of 5 stars

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Tell Me the Truest Thing You Know by Dan O’Hare is a book born out of the death of the author’s father that talks about the life, exploits, and experiences of Dan O’Hare in connection to his relationship with his father and his father's death. At the beginning of this book, he says he wrote this book as a form of therapy for himself.

In the book, the author gives detailed descriptions of his life and struggles, comparing and connecting them to his father's. He tells us about some of the experiences he has lived through and the role his father played in them. He talks about depression, anxiety, and mental illness in general exhaustively, as he suffered from depression and anxiety for years after his father's death. He connects these illnesses to his father's life and how not addressing them affected him greatly.

I loved how he was able to communicate his grief, pain, and other emotions to his readers. He also talked about how the death of his father broke him. I love how despite the book being born out of his father's death, he didn’t center it around that. He talked about different things and fun stories of his life and that of his father, which made the book lively. I also loved his creativity with some of the titles of the chapters. I greatly appreciated his storytelling as he had a nice way with words and knew how to capture his audience.

However, for a book the author says is about him and his father, he gave us more of his autobiography than that of his relationship with his father, which I think did not fit the reason he communicated to his readers for writing the book. Another thing I really didn’t like was that he did a lot of digressing in the book, which at some point made the book difficult to follow. Also, the author didn’t put non-baseball fans and people that generally don’t know anything about baseball into consideration while he was explaining the baseball games. This could make some readers lost in some parts, which I witnessed severally while reading the book; although this may not have been much of an issue for me, it will be for a lot of readers with almost zero knowledge about baseball. I also believe some readers may get confused at some point while reading because his stories were not arranged. I was reading the book and wondering which of the events of his life took place first, which left me confused. It would have been much better if the sequence of events had been better arranged.

I rate this book three out of five stars. I removed a star because while I think the book was a good read, the negative aspects I found in the book affected my satisfaction with it. I also removed an extra star because the book was not professionally edited. I did not give it a lower rating because of the book's positive aspects.

I would recommend this book to people who have experienced loss and to people dealing with depression and anxiety, as this book will be of great help to them.

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Tell Me The Truest Thing You Know
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[Abeymayor]

Tell Me The Truest Thing You Know by Dan O'Hare, can easily be regarded as an autobiography of the author.
I will rate the book the book four out of five stars because the book was written for some set of people and not good for the general public consumption

[Stephanie Stones]

This is an interesting and well thought of review. I would love to try out this book and know more about the fascinating things in it. This is an interesting storyline.