A passionate defense of ambition and a challenge to those who misunderstand or misuse it.
A debut spiritual treatise focuses on the nature of ambition.
Ambition has been labeled a conspicuous evil in modern times, a source of corruption and overreach, a sin to be fought rather than a virtue to be embraced. In his book, Timbo argues that this is a fundamental misreading of a key element of the human psyche. “Ambition is not the problem,” he writes. “The problem lies in the nature or character of the individuals who use that good thing within them solely to achieve their carnal goals; gun violence, prostitution, corruption in government and business, deception, adultery, and more.” In addition to this personal perversion of the qualities of ambition, the author identifies another significant danger: mediocrity. He characterizes this as an addiction, no different to the personality than snake venom to the body, and it’s in this context that Timbo writes that mediocrity is the ultimate thwarting of ambition. The author urges his readers to defeat this weakness and climb out of their own personal pit in order to achieve greatness, which they may not be able to see but that is calling to them all the same (“Life has a way of sometimes helping us get a taste of our destiny”). An appealing narrative of motivational encouragement emerges from this broader discussion of ambition and mediocrity. Timbo sees his readers’ ambitions as the key to their success at overcoming challenges: “If your original situation is a mess or dysfunctional, you were not born into it to be it. You were born into it to change it.” The crucial questions at the heart of the author’s short, energetic manifesto are disarmingly simple: What is your character? Armed with ambition, will you succumb to the many evils Timbo explains, or will you use it to overcome mediocrity and reach your full potential? Readers who have felt the pull of ambition and perhaps distrusted it should find some intriguing reading here.
A passionate defense of ambition and a challenge to those who misunderstand or misuse it.Pub Date: June 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5255-2407-3
Page Count: 180
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 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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