This Book is Not for You: My Loss, My Grief, My Healing

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Jessica Morgan

The title stops you before you even open the book. This Book is Not for You. It is a provocation and an act of profound honesty at the same time. Daniel Isenberg, former Harvard professor, global authority on entrepreneurship, accomplished in virtually every room he has ever walked into, sat down after losing his wife to a rare and untreatable cancer and wrote something that was never meant to teach you anything. It was meant to tell the truth about what it feels like when the person who was the center of your world is simply gone.

That refusal to advise is the book's most radical and most generous quality. The grief memoir shelf is crowded with books that want to guide you through stages, offer frameworks, promise a path through. Isenberg deliberately does none of that. He takes you with him instead, into the months of watching his vivacious, tenacious Neapolitan wife fight something that couldn't be fought, and then into the months after, carrying what he describes as a knife buried in his chest that no amount of intelligence or achievement or professional distinction could do anything about.

What makes the book so unexpectedly powerful is the specificity of his grief. This is not grief in the abstract. It is the grief of this man for this woman, with all the particular textures of their particular life together, and that specificity is what makes it universal. The more precisely he describes his own experience, the more completely the reader finds their own loss reflected in it. Karen Dillon-Perez, former chief editor of the Harvard Business Review, called it powerful, beautiful, painful, and resonant, and all four of those words are exactly right.

Isenberg has danced salsa on stage, painted, given cooking demonstrations, published a children's book, built and invested in companies across three continents. And yet this slim, honest, devastating book may be the most important thing he has ever written.

For anyone who has loved someone fully and lost them completely, this book knows exactly where you are.

About the Author

Daniel Isenberg

Daniel (Dan) Isenberg was raised in Woods Hole Massachusetts, studied and taught at Harvard, and then started raising a family in Cambridge and then in Israel. In Israel Dan entered the world of entrepreneurship as teacher, investor, policy advisor and entrepreneur. With four grown kids, in 2005 Dan moved back to Boston to teach again at HBS, which led to his divorce. In 2009, Dan left the classroom and, at first in collaboration with Babson and later independently, went out into the field to innovate methods for stimulating broad-based prosperity with entrepreneurship, leading to the concept of "entrepreneurship ecosystems," which he pioneered. A prolific professional writer, Dan has over 35 HBR articles, 40 HBS cases, a successful business book ("Worthless, Impossible, and Stupid: How Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value." HBR Press 2013), and a children's book ("The Friends of Kelev Shmelev" in Hebrew). In 2013 Dan met Carla Cefaliello, an Italian neuroscientist doing research at the Marine Biological Laboratory. They fell in love and from 2015 built a life together in Boston and Woods Hole. In 2020 Carla was diagnosed with a rare cancer, and three years after massive surgery, discovered that it had spread. It killed her nine months later in December 2023, after a fierce and determined battle and search for a treatment.