A cleareyed but warmly reassuring self-help guide with loads of hands-on ADD advice.
Forget the Ritalin and try changing lifestyle, outlook, and habits argues this energetic debut primer for adults with Attention Deficit Disorder.
Sachs, a clinical psychologist with ADD who specializes in treating it, contends that drugs rarely help adult sufferers. He recommends instead a targeted regimen of self-analysis and behavior modification pegged to a monthlong calendar of daily lessons and goals (with weekends devoted to review). The program starts with tips on getting a good night’s sleep, proper hydration, exercise to flare off energy, and a suitable diet. (He haphazardly cites the paleo diet, the zone diet, and a gruesome “100 percent organic, raw, vegan diet.”) Sachs moves on to techniques to counteract the impulsiveness, distractions, and inappropriate conduct that plague ADD patients. He encourages readers to inventory their strengths and weaknesses and concentrate on tasks and careers they find interesting—he was reborn when he switched from being an administrative assistant to psychology—and to study and avoid triggers, like dealing with customer service reps, that can spark meltdowns. Noting how persistent lateness, missed deadlines, and chaotic comportment harm families and co-workers, he suggests that readers embed themselves in social networks that train sufferers to become reliable, punctual, and considerate of others. (He credits the men’s group The ManKind Project with helping him cultivate these virtues.) And Sachs offers many straightforward tricks to short-circuit ADD symptoms: keep a notebook to jot down off-topic ideas instead of blurting them out at meetings; loudly say “No!” when attention drifts away from the work; use apps to avoid getting sidetracked by email; break big jobs into small steps with rewards to motivate incremental accomplishments. Sachs provides lucid explanations of the brain science behind the cravings for stimuli and inability to concentrate that plague those with ADD and probes sufferers’ anguish as they cycle through failure, shame, self-loathing, and withdrawal. He conveys all of this with a mix of been-there insight and mordant humor. (The “Instant Gratification Monkey” is “the voice that pipes up when you’re working on your taxes due tomorrow and says, ‘Hey, let’s take a trip down memory [lane] and see if our ex is still on Facebook.’ ”) People with ADD (and many others who recognize themselves) should find much useful guidance here.
A cleareyed but warmly reassuring self-help guide with loads of hands-on ADD advice.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9969507-3-2
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Sachs Center
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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