An accessible story of a man whose quiet moments are filled with heavenly guidance.
A man recounts a lifetime of divine intercession.
Lodewyks characterizes his nonfiction debut as a Navi, a Jewish scriptural term for a work channeled directly through a human mouthpiece from God. “These promptings by the Holy Spirit,” he writes, referring to his own book, “have come from a place unfamiliar to this author’s capabilities as an English writer.” This relationship as conduit and amanuensis for God began while Lodewyks was still in his mother’s womb: she was pregnant with the sixth of seven sons while she and her husband and other children were moving from Holland to Canada. In quick but vivid detail (“God managed to get me excited about the chiropractic profession,” he writes, for example), Lodewkys recounts his youth growing up in Canada, his family life, his marriage, anecdotes of his parents’ and grandparents’ experiences in Holland during World War II, the death of his father from lung cancer, and so on. But there’s a parallel narrative running underneath this autobiography and often surfacing to overtake it. Lodewyks was in a frequent state of spiritual ecstasy, possessed since childhood by the ability to experience moments when all the day’s surrounding noise suddenly went quiet and God made contact with him directly. These visitations were never visible or audible to anybody else, but they guided, surprised, and often amused him—this is a delightfully playful spiritual odyssey. Angels and spirits were everywhere in Lodewyks’ daily life, watching over his friends and relatives, attending the births of his children, safeguarding those children all through their adult lives. Through it all, Lodewyks stresses that his readers don’t require his supernatural gifts in order to further their own spirituality: “Life does not have to go quiet for you to note the signs that God puts in front of you as he directs you to do His work.” The upshot will of course be lost on Lodewyks’s non-Christian readers, but for his fellow faithful, this will be the ultimate comforting account of a safeguarded existence.
An accessible story of a man whose quiet moments are filled with heavenly guidance.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4602-6975-6
Page Count: 232
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 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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