An earnest attempt at providing constructive advice, but its filler intrudes on its more engaging content.
Leaf (Misadventures of a Garden State Yogi, 2016, etc.) offers an eclectic collection of prompts designed to inspire and energize yoga practitioners.
These suggestions cover a range of themes, including not only yoga exercises, but also writing assignments, drawing and coloring activities, and various checklists. In more general prompts, Leaf asks readers perform tasks that seem intended to promote mindfulness in daily life: “Set a timer and spend 3 minutes without talking, looking into the eyes of a friend or partner. How do you feel afterward?” Some are meant to be accomplished in the moment, others during the course of a day or over a longer period of time. The writing exercises ask readers to complete a sentence (such as “I have known for a while now that it is time for me to”), write a list, or answer a question. The blank space provided for the reader, though, seems excessive at times, leaving the book as a whole feeling unfinished. Some prompts ask readers to contemplate his or her answers during their yoga practice and to write a response after completing it. Although only a handful of suggestions specifically call for drawing or coloring, the black-and-white illustrations on other pages call out for readers to color them, too. Overall, though, the quality of the various prompts seems uneven. For instance, some outline a well-defined, actionable task, while others are more indistinct, muddying their goals (such as “Faith is an act of great will. Practice constantly”). Leaf includes many prompts by other authors and yoga practitioners, including well-known names, such as actress Mayim Bialik. These guest-written prompts comprise the most substantial part of the book, providing explicit, practical activities and questions. Also, many pages seem designed to reflect its prompt’s spirit with playful formatting, such as a slanted paragraph structure on a page that encourages readers to “balance this book on your head during tadasana (mountain posture) today.”
An earnest attempt at providing constructive advice, but its filler intrudes on its more engaging content.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-77058-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Living Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2017
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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