Quietly uplifting reading.
A socially conscious Episcopalian priest's account of how and why she started the Thistle Stop Café, a Nashville teahouse that employs females recovering from violence and drug abuse.
In 2001, Stevens (Snake Oil: The Art of Healing and Truth-Telling, 2013, etc.) founded two programs dedicated to helping women who had survived “lives of trafficking, addiction and prostitution.” The first, Magdalene, offered shelter. The second, Thistle Farms, offered Magdalene residents the opportunity to earn a living by selling all-natural bath and body products. A little over a decade later, Stevens decided to open the Thistle Stop Café, a business that would use tea to globally expand her vision of social justice. Not only would the cafe be able to offer more work—and personal healing—to Magdalene women by allowing them to serve a healthful drink; it would also encourage international fair-trade practices by dealing directly with tea farms, many of which employed women. The more involved Stevens became in her project—which at times struggled for its very life before finding the financial support it needed to continue—the more she began to see how tea defined the nature of her work in more ways than she imagined. Its association with ritual inspired her to see the way tea-drinking could offer “peace and clarity” in a troubled world. While many teas could be light, others could, like the history of tea itself, also be bitter. But those more biting teas reminded the author of the importance of learning how to sweeten “the cup we have before us” and learn to practice gratitude—like the Magdalene women whose stories she also includes in the book—for all things received. Accompanied throughout by deliciously unique recipes for homemade tea blends and brews, Stevens’ narrative is a softly delivered meditation on the power of faith and love to make a difference in the lives of those who need it most.
Quietly uplifting reading.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1455519026
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Jericho Books/Hachette
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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