This moving account of a cathartic journey may tempt readers to engage in some tropical soul searching of their own.
In this debut memoir, a 45-year-old businesswoman leaves her job to find peace in Costa Rica.
At first glance, Henson seemed to have it all—a high-paying position in IT management, a beautiful San Diego, California, home, and a loving life partner named Dana. Thanks to her well-funded 401(k), she was even planning on retiring at 55. But beneath the surface, troubles were brewing, and one day at work, she fainted. Physically and mentally exhausted, Henson searched for a cure for her fainting but was unsatisfied with traditional Western doctors—one diagnosed her with depression and prescribed Paxil. She finally found help for her mind/body/spirit, relying on an intuitive healer, Chinese herbs and minerals, meditation, and an integrative medical doctor. After much soul searching, she also decided to pursue a master’s degree in international peace and conflict studies from the University for Peace in Costa Rica. Henson’s story explores familiar themes (think Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love) in her search for inner peace in an exotic locale. But she was not divorced, and Dana patiently waited for her to return home in a year. This is not the chronicle of a rugged jungle adventure—Henson’s rented casita on the edge of the rainforest came with a housekeeper—and there is much talk of college classes and new friends. Adding a self-help feel to the memoir, chapters conclude with author reflections and useful questions to ponder, such as “What do you fear others might discover about you?” Though Henson’s voice is warm and her prose is smooth, there are some rambling passages. For example, in one scene, she ruminates about the pros and cons of tithing. The next scene describes a cut-and-paste “vision board” made as a class project with her church. Nevertheless, the author’s flashbacks are poignant as she describes horrible physical and mental abuse from her father. The strength of her story lies in her ability to understand and forgive him—and forge ahead with her life.
This moving account of a cathartic journey may tempt readers to engage in some tropical soul searching of their own.Pub Date: May 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62865-510-0
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Motivational Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 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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