Guaranteed to galvanize more than a few couch potatoes into action.
A former Navy SEAL explains his take-no-prisoners approach to life in this candid memoir/self-help book.
“I should have been a statistic,” admits debut author Goggins. A childhood marked by abuse and racial prejudice seemed to leave him destined for a life of struggle and failure. But after nearly flunking out of high school, Goggins got tough on himself, realizing that he’d never fulfill his dream of joining the military if he didn’t shape up fast. And shape up he did, eventually becoming a Navy SEAL, celebrated endurance athlete, and one-time Guinness World Record holder for the most pull-ups performed in a 24-hour period. Yet as a teen, Goggins barely made it into the Air Force after failing the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test twice. Later, he had to drop 100 pounds in three months in order to join the SEALs. His laundry list of accomplishments is impressive, and he tells his remarkable story in a direct, conversational way, though his language is often raw. Much of the book recounts the author’s experiences in military training and competing in ultramarathons and endurance sports, offering a fascinating peek into those subcultures (expect a few graphic photos of what toes look like after running a 100-plus-mile race). He also speaks frankly about his moments of doubt and failure. Each chapter ends with challenges to complete. The goal is to bring readers “nose-to-concrete with your own bullshit limits you didn’t even know were there.” According to Goggins, most people are operating at about 40 percent of their true capability, and he makes a convincing case that tapping into that unused 60 percent is largely a matter of mental discipline. Doing so requires fortitude and sacrifice—Goggins admits he “lived like a monk” to achieve his level of success—but will eventually lead to “self-mastery.” And through all the tough talk, he also offers words of encouragement: “Your small victories are your cookies to savor.” Some might find Goggins’ intensity a bit intimidating, but there’s no doubt his story is inspiring.
Guaranteed to galvanize more than a few couch potatoes into action.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5445-1228-0
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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