Frank, warm, unflinching, and compassionate—a heartfelt work that explores sorrow and healing.
Survivors describe their grieving processes and how they found strength in the face of death in this volume about spiritual growth.
Ensign (Traveling Spirit: Daily Tools for Your Life’s Journey, 2013) begins her second book with a dedication to all of the lost loved ones whose tales are told in these personal interviews. Her introduction describes how she sought out grieving people, ages 19 to 89, of diverse faiths, secular backgrounds, races, and socio-economic levels. She asked them to share not only their stories, but also what helped them and what they would want others to know about their journeys. Her prologue urges readers to view the healing process as individual “heart knowledge” and includes a tale of loss that will be retold by a different family member later in the volume. Seven chapters with inspirational quotes describe the heartache and shock as well as the guilt, confusion, and secrecy (especially with a suicide or drug overdose) that surrounded the experiences. The author’s themes address the disorientation of sudden accidents, the challenges of caregiving, and the dangers of interrupted grieving—due to personal misconceptions or others’ exhortations to “Get over it.” Conversely, the book examines feelings of peace in fond memories; a sense of a deeper faith, purpose, or transcendence; and the empowerment to make a positive change in the world. Ensign returns to one of her interviewees in a deft epilogue and shares her own tragic loss. Told in the survivors’ own words and laced with the author’s insights, this honest work does not shrink from uncomfortable subjects. The survivors—who include Jews, Christians, Muslims, atheists, Buddhists, Santería practitioners, and New Age believers—differ in their methods but agree that self-care is crucial. Each stresses that a person’s healing comes in its own time. Ensign’s mature and tolerant approach uncovers humor, anger, and disgust that are often self-censored in conversations at the funeral home, gravesite, or memorial service. (Interestingly, even devoutly religious survivors resented the well-meaning “a better place” and “see them again” sentiments.)
Frank, warm, unflinching, and compassionate—a heartfelt work that explores sorrow and healing.Pub Date: July 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9883320-0-3
Page Count: 300
Publisher: SpiritHawk Life Publications
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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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