Poignant and powerfully affirmative, this account offers an intensive reading experience that should particularly appeal to...
An author and health coach divulges how she overcame abuse and physical and mental anguish to emerge as a strong, compassionate individual.
In her own words, Carranza’s epiphanic debut memoir unfolds “like the plot of a Lifetime miniseries or a telenovela.” And in many ways, it does. She writes frankly about her childhood in Mexico. According to the author, she faced undisciplined sibling abuse at the hands of her older sister while trying to come to terms with a distant mother who “never said the words I desperately needed to hear.” These problems spurred years of deteriorating self-esteem and suicide attempts. Despite the doting adoration of her grandparents and uncle, Carranza felt less than loved. As she matured, her descent into debilitating depression continued after a teenage miscarriage, even while the bond with her father strengthened. The writer’s world crumbled further after her father was brutally murdered at age 43 and she was left with unanswered questions and unprocessed grief well into her adult years. In Carranza’s 20s, while modeling, acting, and carelessly becoming involved with kingpins in the local drug cartel, she entered into what she describes as a seven-year horrifically abusive marriage. Thankfully, she found benevolence and became buoyed by her “Earth angels,” individuals who provided solace, guidance, and unconditional friendship. During the nearly fatal birth of her daughter, the author experienced an extraordinary spiritual vision in which Mary Magdalene appeared before her, reinforcing the message that “if I was strong enough and walked through the fire with love, hope, and faith, I’d make it” and “find Heaven on Earth.” As she relates in her moving book, this ethereal episode prompted her to finally end her tortured marriage and rediscover happiness despite a barrage of physical challenges that lay ahead, including kidney problems and her daughter’s teenage battle with Hashimoto’s disease. Fighting through the fear and shame of a botched childhood, Carranza finally reached a catharsis and emerged as a wholly complete, if weathered, “lioness,” who, as the title suggests, believed that “our lives are like the life of a butterfly.” She also shares what she has found to be the “keys to Heaven on Earth,” which should be profoundly motivational and inspiring to readers in a similar situation as the author. Suffused with painful vulnerability, her emotionally raw and vividly written narrative is bifurcated between the angst of a melancholic life and the lush, poetic revelations that eventually superseded all the darkness that came before it. The chapters in Carranza’s memoir read like emotionally acute diary entries dictating the ebb and flow of a life overcome by tragedy yet ultimately yielding to the light of a new day with endless opportunities to reinvigorate love, perseverance, faith, and joy.
Poignant and powerfully affirmative, this account offers an intensive reading experience that should particularly appeal to readers who find themselves unfairly battered by circumstances and the cruel slings and arrows of life.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-953258-02-1
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Y-O Management
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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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