A well-written but ultimately uneven motivational guide for teens.
A teenager advises other teens on how to achieve success in this manual.
Ouellet (The Super Students Guide to Navy Seal Productivity, 2017) was a bullied kid who dealt with his feelings by acting out, often landing himself in the vice principal’s office. It got so bad that, when he was 13 years old, he began contemplating suicide. Through the support of his parents, teachers, and life coach, Ouellet learned to see himself differently: as a good kid with a lot of potential who just needed a new perspective. With this book, he hopes to share what he’s learned in the intervening years with his fellow teens so that they might undergo the same regenerative process. He encourages readers to learn from their mistakes, set excuses aside, and build winning attitudes in order to move through life with greater success. Much of Ouellet’s regimen is structured around discovering one’s passions, picking goals that relate to those interests, and achieving those objectives through helpful strategies like deadlines and daily routines. The author prescribes rituals for morning, bedtime, and throughout the day so that readers are always working toward their goals. Because this is a book for teens, a good portion of it is dedicated to becoming a better student. Ouellet writes in an enthusiastic prose that is certainly impressive for a 16-year-old: “Your mind is like a garden, so you must fertilize it with the best ideas and knowledge.” But contentwise, the book is boilerplate, Tony Robbins–style motivation, which, when spoken in the voice of a teen, comes off as slightly odd. Ouellet’s vision of success is both materialistic and grandiose. It’s a worldview that seems as if it might place greater pressure on teenage readers, not less. When the 13-year-old Ouellet confessed his thoughts of suicide to his father, his parent responded: “I promise you that within a year from now, you’ll be achieving heights you’ll have never thought possible. You’ll be happier than you’ve ever been.” Many readers will likely be left wondering if minors aren’t a bit young for this sort of hyperbolic aspirational thinking.
A well-written but ultimately uneven motivational guide for teens.Pub Date: March 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5255-0791-5
Page Count: 204
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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