A lean but surprisingly comprehensive guide that skillfully tells readers how to analyze and take control of their...
A debut manual offers advice on reprogramming inner attitudes about succeeding in life.
Joyette’s slim handbook starts with an appealingly functional premise: that people approach the world’s challenges in ways largely determined by their early upbringings and personal “programming.” The author maintains that individuals can change this programming if they work at it (and, of course, consider the thoughts and guidelines laid out in this volume). Joyette wants his readers to ask themselves some disarmingly simple questions: What explanations do you have for the way your life currently is, and if it isn’t to your liking, why is that? What are the factors that have gone into making your life and personality the way they are? The central contention of these pages is that most of the answers to such questions lie inside individuals—and are under their control if they’ll only free themselves from negative, self-limiting thinking. “It is incredible,” Joyette sarcastically notes, “how expert we become at ‘knowing’ what we can and cannot do.” The essence of this inspirational book’s teachings—presented in clear, highly kinetic prose—is that such expertise is often a self-fulfilling prophecy, the product of letting all of life’s negative stimuli pile up and harden into a crust of self-defeat. The author’s advice examines many personal improvement topics, always distinguishing between inner and outer enhancements—and emphasizing that the former is more important. On the subject of physical appearance, for instance, he advises modifying it in positive ways. But he stresses that the crucial second step is to “internalize positive beliefs” about appearance rather than tying self-esteem directly to it (“If you attach your self-worth in any way to how you look, and you aren’t satisfied with what you look like, you’re setting yourself up to be miserable”). Joyette includes a particularly blunt and enlightening chapter on how to apply these self-image improvement techniques when one is black in America—a subset frequently plagued with its own challenges, which the author addresses with plainspoken sensitivity.
A lean but surprisingly comprehensive guide that skillfully tells readers how to analyze and take control of their self-images.Pub Date: June 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5255-2416-5
Page Count: 168
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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