Skeptics will raise their eyebrows, but open-minded parents will find encouragement in Evans’ story.
A mother turns to Chinese medicine and alternative therapies to heal her autistic child.
Evans’ daughter, Sarah, was a bright, happy child until the age of 4, when she began exhibiting some unusual symptoms, including an awkward gait, repetitive speech patterns, and trouble socializing with other children. Her behavioral issues were compounded by disturbing physical symptoms, including food sensitivities, hives, vomiting, and bug bites that refused to heal. Trips to numerous doctors yielded no clear answers. The official diagnosis from her pediatrician was “delayed development,” although Evans recounts that “he told me in words that she was autistic.” Desperate for answers, the author embarked on a quest to cure her child. Eventually, a friend’s recommendation led her to Dr. Ross J. Stark, who practiced traditional Chinese medicine as well as an unusual alternative therapy called Nambudripad’s Allergy Elimination Technique, developed by a chiropractor and acupuncturist named Devi Nambudripad in the 1980s. Once Sarah began the NAET treatments, Evans writes, her condition improved dramatically. The child’s visits to Dr. Stark, coupled with dietary changes, seemed to reduce her dyslexia symptoms, improve her ability to focus, and enhance her coordination. The author tells of her daughter’s therapy in exhaustive detail, explaining the meticulous process of clearing Sarah’s body of the “blockages in her system that did not allow various nutrients to flow freely.” Although Evans had already removed many problematic foods from Sarah’s diet months earlier, she says, “they would still be present in her system since the body carries a memory of everything that passes through it”; the alternative therapies, she notes, recalibrated Sarah’s digestive system and eventually allowed her to return some offending foods to her diet. Evans’ account of her daughter’s transformation is certainly inspiring. However, the treatments she describes sometimes sound far-fetched, and the book stumbles when it points to discredited research by Dr. Andrew Wakefield to support Evans’ contention that childhood vaccines may be connected to her daughter’s condition. Nonetheless, the author’s commitment to doing whatever it took to ease her daughter’s symptoms will appeal to other parents looking for solutions to their own children’s health problems.
Skeptics will raise their eyebrows, but open-minded parents will find encouragement in Evans’ story.Pub Date: June 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-37465-8
Page Count: 245
Publisher: West River Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2015
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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