Inspiring, infectious, and at times exhilarating; especially uplifting for anyone tormented by self-doubt.
A punchy, motivational exhortation to think deeply about life.
Wise, a trainer/coach who hosted an online radio show, says his goal for this debut is “to infuse success principles with neuroscience in an easy to understand conversation.” For the most part, he succeeds. Much of the material falls into the power-of-positive-thinking genre; the book boils down to the notion that one can accomplish almost anything with the right mindset. While this is a familiar self-improvement theme, the content is well packaged. There are 21 short chapters; each addresses a particular situation and concludes with specific action steps. This structure allows readers to isolate small, definable areas and resolve them individually rather than feel bulldozed by multifaceted problems that demand complex solutions. There is a great deal of flexibility; chapters stand alone and can be read in any order. The topics are intriguing; “You Have Been Misdiagnosed,” for example, notes how others’ perceptions can skew one’s judgment of oneself. The effect becomes clear in the questions the author asks: “Is there a decision that you made that was not truly what you wanted to do? Was that decision based on what someone else thought you should be doing or would be good at doing?” Some of Wise’s salient observations are eye-opening; e.g.: “When your beliefs are limiting beliefs, you will fight just as hard for them,” and “If you are only doing enough to get what you think you can have, you will never get what you actually want.” The writing style here is engaging and intimate. Wise’s voice is consultative yet friendly; his prose is constructed in “me-to-you” fashion, making it personal and nonthreatening, and he uses examples taken from his own life experience to drive home his points. He is relentlessly positive and encouraging yet has the ability to tell it like it is.
Inspiring, infectious, and at times exhilarating; especially uplifting for anyone tormented by self-doubt.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73262-590-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: WiseDecisions
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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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