by Bill W. ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 2018
An excellent resource for understanding and overcoming addiction written with both authority and humility.
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A debut guide presents a secularized 12-step program filled with advice gained from personal experience.
When Bill W. (not the Bill W. who co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous) was finally ready to face his alcohol addiction, he followed the Twelve Steps until he fully recovered. But he constantly needed to adapt the AA program to fit his agnostic views. To help others like himself, he has since created a secularized version of the program by rewording the “God steps” to work for addicts regardless of their faith. This essentially replaces dependence on God with the responsibility to “show up and take an active part” in your recovery. Religious readers may wince at this effort to remove God, but the author puts forth a convincing argument, asserting that the traditional program deters many nonbelieving addicts from pursuing a highly effective plan. (He also expresses his respect for religion, something that should ease tensions with the faithful.) Later in the book, W. delves into the biological processes of addiction and the universal characteristics of users, applying knowledge he has acquired as both a biologist and former alcoholic. In this section in particular, the author makes complex concepts incredibly clear by using tangible examples and metaphors. For example, he compares addiction to a furnace with a broken thermostat that will continue to heat up until there are disastrous consequences. The second half of the manual is focused solely on W.’s plan, with steps broken down into “The First 90 Days Sober” (Steps 1 to 3), “Reconstruction” (Steps 4 to 9), and “Long-Term Sobriety” (Steps 10 to 12). Having traversed the 12-step program himself, the author often uses the pronoun “we” with a tone free of judgment. His sharing of powerful firsthand experiences further personalizes and legitimizes his writing. One of the book’s weaknesses is that the target audience is unclear and shifts depending on the section. Only the second half seems directed at addicts themselves. The fact-heavy first half seems more for those researching addiction or recovery programs. Still, the guide contains a wealth of information and inspiration from beginning to end.
An excellent resource for understanding and overcoming addiction written with both authority and humility.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9996435-0-1
Page Count: 117
Publisher: Beowulf Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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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