A pastiche of tried-and-true aphorisms best swallowed in small bits.
A debut advice book filled with valuable lifelong principles for children, from motivational speaker and successful CEO Franklin.
In five sections (The Super Self, Making Wishes Come True, The School of Life, Relationships, Good Choices) and a year’s worth of instruction, this book should serve parents well as a guide to teaching their kids the habits crucial to success—which in the author’s view is like tasty, nutritious peanut butter enriched with lessons intended to “stick with you your entire life, and if you allow them, they will help to build the character necessary to lead others.” Much of the life-coaching advice here is based on Franklin’s own experience, starting with his teen years when he quickly parlayed a low-paying job into a managerial position), while other lessons are informed by his Christian faith or absorbed from other people—Bill Cosby, GE CEO Jack Welch, Harold Kushner, Winston Churchill, singer John Michael Montgomery, etc. Overall, the advice seems practical, even if it’s nothing new. There’s no room for self-pity here: “You can only climb out of that dark place when you allow yourself to see the light and find the conviction in your heart to reach for it.” While some of the glib observations—“kids are naturally selfish” and “our culture promotes instant gratification”—reflect personal prejudice rather than objective verification, the idea that parents need to thoughtfully inculcate good habits is a worthy one; still, Franklin says, don’t “flood a child’s mind with all this insight at once.” Some of the reminders—that “[a]ll you have is time” so invest rather than spend time, and that there is an important distinction between a decision and a commitment—should benefit both generations. All the easily digestible, straightforward advice underscores his belief that “Education and growth have no end if you move through life with both your eyes and your mind wide open.”
A pastiche of tried-and-true aphorisms best swallowed in small bits.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615912820
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Everilis Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 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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