Intelligent and penetrating.
Are American minds drowning in the sludgy by-product of society’s manipulative culture?
Gebelein (Re-Educating Myself, 1985), a Harvard-educated computer programmer, worries that our minds are at the constant mercy of polluting elements like “the constant chatter of cultural ideas,” influential judgments and persuasive hypnotic suggestion. “Social manipulations” and the tribe mentality play a great part in the societal structures of behavior, Gebelein opines, and it is up to the last remaining free-thinkers to set themselves apart and to lead others away from destructive behavioral patterning. The author rehashes many of the themes explored in his previous book, in which he utilized psychotherapy, cultural withdrawal and dream analysis to downshift himself from the harmful cultural ideas infused by the turbulent era of the 1950s and ’60s. Gebelein dissects three of the most “fundamental belief systems” known today (religious, academic and New Age), scrupulously examining their origins, their worth and their blatant inaccuracies. The author goes on to describe, in great detail, the ways in which the human mind may be poisoned (i.e., polluted) by specific sets of circumstances or stimuli. In one of the more entertaining sections, Gebelein incorporates verbatim dialogue extracted from Internet discussion groups to support his thought processes as he endlessly defends his opinions against a tide of derogatory online detractors. These verbal volleys would make great entertainment all on their own. Gebelein’s strengths lie within the sections where he makes simple sense rather than drumming up conspiracy theory about subliminal manipulation, social coercion, mental warfare, spirituality and sorcery. He smartly argues that government officials are more effective when focused on serving the public rather than exerting dominance over it and that religion fills our “social need” for authoritarian figures. He challenges the validity of television news, calls out the “bad logic” of the insurance industry, amusingly dismisses laws on the use of seatbelts and concludes that mind pollution is ultimately caused by the social pressures exerted by those closest to us rather than the “obvious lies and manipulations of politics and advertising.” His book unveils itself as a challenge to readers to unclog their minds and become open to the truths lying just beneath the propaganda.
Intelligent and penetrating.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2007
ISBN: 27.00
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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