A funeral director’s heartfelt, poignant, and vivid insights into what makes life worth living.
An unlikely source delivers a variety of life lessons.
In his nonfiction debut, Meyer draws on his 14 years as the owner of a funeral home in order to distill lessons about life he’s learned from people dealing with death. His experiences have sprawled all over the map: “I have seen horrific, absolutely horrific, things, smelled smells that are unimaginable, cried with friends and strangers, and witnessed unspeakable tragedy, heartache, and death all too often for one human being.” In fast-paced and involving chapters, the author mixes stories from his long experience of coping with grieving and personal vignettes to create a big picture view of the important things in life. He recounts winningly honest personal experiences, including, of course, the time he moved to Northern California and bought a funeral home. “In my eyes,” he reflects, “there is no greater time to grow and become strong than when you have no other option—the last resort.” He gives advice on 20 major turning points or elements in life, from loving your parents and falling in love to coping with heartache, encountering health setbacks, and enduring inevitable aging. He urges his readers to work hard to avoid boring rituals. “If your day becomes routine,” he writes simply, “your life will be shorter.” And he relates each of these turning points to a period in his own life or the experiences of his customers over the years at the funeral home. Many of these tales are touching and some are funny (for instance, the widow who wanted her professional clown husband to be buried in his clown suit). And all are followed by “Reminders,” key takeaway points like “Take risks”; “Without failure, how can you appreciate success?”; and “Your gut is the greatest barometer you will ever have.” Meyer’s approachable writing style guarantees that readers will be both moved and entertained.
A funeral director’s heartfelt, poignant, and vivid insights into what makes life worth living.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73334-431-9
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Meaning of Life Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2019
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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