A refreshing look at wellness from a big-picture perspective.
In this self-help guide, pillars of wellness replace quick fixes while illustrating a holistic approach to health.
Like many wellness authors, Horn (Living Green: A Practical Guide to Simple Sustainability, 2006) uses his own experiences to build a model for healthy living. Tired of the traditional “Standard American Diet,” he began researching and modifying his own habits, recording his physiological and mental improvements along the way. Unlike many other titles in the genre, the book suggests a six-pillar approach to wellness rather than speedy remedies, life “hacks,” or minor tweaks. This tactic seeks to find a bridge between the evolutionary history of humans and the modern realities that present obstacles to a healthy existence—tight living space, lack of movement, and the availability of harmful foods. The six pillars—thinking well, eating well, moving well, sleeping well, hosting well, and staying well—provide an all-encompassing strategy. For example, in the section “Thinking Well,” the author describes the benefits of planning and ranking. With busy lives, demanding jobs, growing kids, and complex obligations, people can easily lose sight of health as a priority. The author suggests beginning with the concept of what living healthy means to the individual—and scheduling activities that match that vision. Horn provides a great insight about objectives: “Updating your goals isn’t abandoning them.” In other words, he explains, it’s better to adapt than to stay rigidly wedded to a design that may not currently serve an individual’s ambitions. In “Eating Well,” the author deftly supplies heavily researched data about several major diets, including paleo, Mediterranean, and the standard American diet. He then points to an overarching “85% rule” (“the right percentage of the time to stay strictly disciplined” about eating well) that can be used to determine the best template for nutrition and lifestyle. Horn also discusses the benefits of intermittent fasting to rest the digestive system. The book is cleverly stocked with statistics that hit home—such as the tidbit that one hour of watching TV shortens an individual’s life by 22 minutes. “Moving Well” helpfully covers the various benefits of swimming, resistance training, and more while supplying many cited references for data and statistics. In “Hosting Well,” Horn discusses the importance of accommodating healthy bacteria and includes valuable and less common information about avoiding phthalates, BPA, and pesticides.
A refreshing look at wellness from a big-picture perspective.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9825159-6-9
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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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