A curative, uplifting attachment workbook.
A gentle, nonjudgmental guide to healing childhood wounds and developing full, satisfying relationships in adulthood.
Debut author Narang, a Buddhist clinical psychologist in Santa Monica, Calif., explains how readers with attachment anxiety, attachment avoidance, or elements of both, can overcome them by using targeted exercises and mindfulness. People with attachment anxiety, the author writes, may have had caregivers with inconsistent emotional responses. This has left them perpetually unsure of whether relationships will meet their emotional needs. Those with attachment avoidance, on the other hand, may have had caregivers who were completely unresponsive, causing them to deny their emotional needs during adulthood. Narang, in this book, seeks to pre-emptively identify barriers to emotional success, and his soothing tone (“[r]emember, I am flawed, you are flawed, this book is flawed, and we are all also deeply good”) enhances the work considerably. He restates key points with subtle variations, but the repetition enhances readers’ understanding instead of feeling monotonous. The author clearly explains the workbook’s overall format and each activity’s rationale (“you will address the problem first and then move toward building strength, much in the way that if you had an infection in your foot, you would heal that infection first before moving on to building muscles by running”). He also fully defines all psychological jargon to make the book accessible to a broad readership, although some exercises might have benefited from deeper explanations. That said, the variety of exercises is impressive; the attachment anxiety section, for example, includes activities titled “Why Do I Feel Desperation and Cling to Others?” and “I Get Really Mad When Others Don’t See Things the Way I Do”; for attachment avoidance, Narang offers “I Am Already Enough, Even Before Improving More” and “Beyond Constant Problem Solving.” Not every exercise will apply to every person, he explains, which allows the reader to tailor the workbook to his or her own needs. This flexible approach, combined with the author’s easily understandable, peaceful style, make this a restorative work for a wide audience.
A curative, uplifting attachment workbook.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615860893
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Stronger Relationships
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2014
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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