A hefty, expansive exploration of New Age spirituality, not for the uninitiated.
A metaphysical guide focuses on navigating one’s inner realm and exploring other planes and facets of existence.
This guide to clairvoyance and esoteric realms takes the form of an extended collection of visualization exercises rooted in chakra meditation and Taoism, incorporating elements of the Buddhist perspective on attachment and the law of attraction. Marks (And Now for a Word from the Angels, 2015) encourages readers to experience these “celestial journeys” in any order of their choosing. The exercises place an emphasis on cultivating self-acceptance, well-being, and a sense of one’s enduring spiritual connection to an all-encompassing, broader universe. Over the course of five chapters, the visualizations move from nurturing a sense of grounding in the body to contemplating aura work, the astral plane, and parallel universes. Several sections are narrated by what the author describes as the channeled spirits of angels, the most prominent of whom are Séan and Crystal. The text is punctuated throughout with vivid illustrations and an assortment of colorful typefaces. A large portion of the text consists of a detailed series of appendices containing extra pointers for fostering a mindful state of being and further details about the author’s own “dimensional travels,” along with foundational information about chakras, auras, and other metaphysical concepts. Abbreviated versions of the visualizations complete the volume. Marks’ idiosyncratic book should appeal to those with a strong knowledge of metaphysics, New Age philosophies, and clairvoyance. But novices in these subjects may find the abstract concepts and ideas offered difficult to grasp, partly due to the free-form structure and style of the book, which can sometimes feel more like a memoir of the author’s experiences than a practical how-to guide for developing one’s own spiritual practices. An introductory section outlining the basics—and perhaps companion audio to facilitate the visualizations and guided meditations—might enhance the book’s appeal to a broader audience.
A hefty, expansive exploration of New Age spirituality, not for the uninitiated.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5227-2813-9
Page Count: 444
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2016
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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