Muller’s personal text offers a firsthand glimpse into the alternative therapies of hypnosis, neuromuscular response therapy (NMR) and past-life regression.
After a lifelong journey through many different types of traditional therapies to ascertain why she always felt discontented, Muller discovered certified clinical hypnotist Pamela Chilton and began a course of alternative therapy that she says allowed her to understand the physical and mental challenges of her life and find happiness. A self-proclaimed neophyte in her book’s topics, with a background in theater and small-business start-ups, Muller states upfront that she’s no expert in the subject—she has simply printed the transcripts of 17 of her therapy sessions with Chilton in an effort to share her learning with others. In the types of therapy Muller describes through Chilton’s approach, the answer to the great unknowns of life is to regress to whatever experiences in this life or past lives generated the thought that caused the ongoing unhappiness or ailment and then literally erase it. The soul knows all, Muller posits, and we can consult our higher self for all the problems of life that plague us. The sessions she transcribes range from tracing problems with her eyesight to a past life as an Essene and a relative of Jesus in the time of the crucifixion, to learning about a birth defect in her heart, traced to a life as a greedy, dishonest 18th-century Boston merchant, to regressing to her younger selves to heal a painful legacy of sexual abuse. It’s a comforting idea that we can—and already do—know everything we need to know and can fix our problems as easily as erasing a chalkboard, but while Muller’s book presents plenty of personal detail, it lacks objective information and stops short of offering any way for readers to explore the ideas for themselves other than seeking out a hypnotherapist who specializes in these techniques. For readers already on board with alternative therapies, Muller is a fluid writer, and Chilton’s dialogue supplies an intriguing, if repetitive, narrative; but there’s little case made to convince the unconverted in what amounts to a documentary about Muller’s personal therapy sessions.
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0983653202
Page Count: 213
Publisher: Inner Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2011
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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