Passionate writing on a plethora of topics that might have delved deeper into its positive philosophy.
A searing indictment of the heterosexual patriarchy and evangelical institutions that posits that true spirituality is found through love, not religion.
Bradley’s debut offers what many readers may see as a radical idea: that Jesus Christ’s message of love was ultimately hijacked by straight men in powerful religious organizations that promote inequality and impede civil rights. These institutions, he says, cultivate an atmosphere that threatens Christ’s nurturing love by empowering propagators of “dark thoughts”—including political conservatives and their “values voters.” As a result, Bradley’s book encourages a rejection of religion and dark thinkers in favor of a spirituality focused on love, self-reliance and personal well-being. Along with an introduction to this philosophy, he offers an array of commentaries on disparate subjects, including gun ownership, the benefits of meditation, the lie of the American dream, and the dangers of pornography and video games. The timeliest of these looks at the long-term effects of bullying, drawing on the author’s own experiences as a gay teenager. Although this book clearly champions the rights of the LGBT community in general, it hardly touches upon bisexual and transgender issues, instead focusing primarily on those of gay men. As is fitting for its subject matter, the book reads like a sermon, filled with fiery rhetoric and plentiful vitriol (“Barbaric violence between testosterone-driven alpha male masters is abnormal”), but it still manages to digress in an easy, conversational matter. It also includes a smattering of biblical references, along with some vague anecdotes and unsourced figures. However, for a text that focuses so heavily on love being the path to spirituality, it’s surprisingly negative. It’s clear that the author’s indignation comes from a candid place, so it is impossible not to feel sympathetic and share his outrage. But because so much of the book bristles with anger, many of its most promising ideas remain unexplored.
Passionate writing on a plethora of topics that might have delved deeper into its positive philosophy.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692301272
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Bradley House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2015
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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