A valuable and compact approach for removing the most corrosive tendencies of self-criticism.
A debut guide explores ways to control and silence self-doubts.
“The Critic operates inside of you,” writes Ross in his book. “It is your enemy.” In a brief narrative characterized by this type of blunt language, the author describes the three central components of the kind of deeply internalized self-criticism that’s the subject of his manual. This self-criticism (“the Critic”) is first of all autonomous—it’s not a product of conscious choice. Second, this censure is also, paradoxically, external, created from negative input received as a child (“Even though the criticism comes from within, it is foreign in nature”). And third, this appraisal is completely negative and malicious. Ross breaks down every aspect of the Critic and its tactics, always in sharp, succinct language designed to be remembered. Readers are told, for instance, that the Critic’s attacks are always lies, since they rely on the presumption that the entire person, rather than some aspect, is deficient (“No one on the planet can be defective, or a loser or worthless…as a person”). The discussion ranges from the toll the Critic exacts on individuals to the cumulative waste and misery it causes the whole world in collateral damage, such as “marital and family strife, domestic violence, divorce, childhood abuse, rape, teen suicide, depression, crime, terrorism, persecution—and so much more.” By skillfully anatomizing both the tactics and the component parts of the inner conflicts that give rise to the Critic, Ross constructs a series of straightforward approaches to fixing the problem. “Since anger is always toxic,” he writes at one point, “the goal is to eliminate it 100%.” This kind of frank, no-nonsense advice will be invaluable to many readers accustomed to the fuzzy generalities of most self-help books. Although the author pays far too little attention to the well-known positive effects an inner critic can have (tact, for instance, would be impossible otherwise), his guide delivers a bolt of refreshingly direct advice on how to ease up on yourself.
A valuable and compact approach for removing the most corrosive tendencies of self-criticism.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-578-08492-3
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Out Reach Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2019
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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