Provides a solid road map for dealing with life’s curveballs in a constructive way.
An author presents a straightforward system for coping with stress and crisis.
While readers might not be able to prevent life’s many upheavals, both big and small, they can control how they handle them, according to Drapeau (co-author: How Did You Do That!, 2009). After facing down several disasters, including his wife’s terminal illness, he developed a simple and accessible seven-step “Shatterproof System,” which he promises will help readers “navigate, manage and rise above any crisis.” Most people respond to events such as a job loss or illness with feelings of anxiety, vulnerability, and failure, the author explains in this compact, pointed volume. These reactions are normal, but they can become traps that negatively affect their lives and health. By embracing the clearly outlined Shatterproof principles and completing the useful exercises at the end of each chapter, individuals should be able to effectively surmount crises and push forward. The process begins with acknowledging the situation, followed by accepting and embracing the opportunities it presents even though such a move “requires a paradigm shift away from feelings of victimization and helplessness.” Additional steps include examining worst-case scenarios, freeing oneself from worry, and creating a robust plan to regain equilibrium. Readers are also encouraged to complete a “gratitude inventory” and embrace faith in a higher power in order to foster confidence. (That final step might alienate nonreligious readers.) Anecdotes from the author’s own life as well as examples from his friends and family successfully illustrate the principles in action. Several of these stories, particularly Drapeau’s reflections on his wife’s battle with cancer, are truly moving and inspiring. The tone throughout is positive and uplifting without straying into the realm of banal self-help clichés. Anyone who gets bogged down in decision-making or is overwhelmed by unexpected events stands to benefit from the author’s levelheaded advice and his persuasive suggestion that retreating from the chaos and developing mental focus are what are needed to take command and make wise choices.
Provides a solid road map for dealing with life’s curveballs in a constructive way.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9976749-0-3
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Horizon Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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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