A high-reaching work on spirituality that lacks cohesive narration.
Debut author Barton ponders spiritual and philosophical questions from various angles in this esoteric meditation on Christianity, karma, time, space, and other topics.
What is the purpose of the soul? How do we form our belief systems? These are among the questions that the author tackles in this ambitious discussion. In 10 chapters, she teases out aspects of the spiritual realm and its worth in the modern world, broaching concepts as broad as perception itself. The text appears to document the author acting as a medium for a being named “John,” who discusses various topics with a group of listeners who respond in italics, paragraph by paragraph. In a chapter on belief systems, John asks the listeners to catalog their beliefs and inquire into their origins. In another, on perception, he challenges listeners to define what creates a perception. John offers analogies and scenarios to ensure that the listeners understand each tenet under discussion, but these sometimes become hypothetical (“Just supposing you [have] been asked to be driving from A to B”). As the chapters progress, the ideas leap from the spiritual to the metaphysical, with discussion of other dimensions, “Earth time,” karma, and vibrations, among other topics. John introduces some new terms (“Disconnection to the physical is through what is called your Silver Cord”) and some empowering ideas (“To feel that you are a victim of your circumstances is to say that your Divine Essence has no intent or Will to Good for you”), all of which contribute to a heady volume of tough questions and tougher answers. The subtitle of this book could have been “Do you see?” as the narrator says that phrase many dozens of times, apparently assuming that the listeners (and readers) are, indeed, understanding each aspect of philosophy at hand. However, the book provides no clear context for either John or the listeners, so it’s hard to discern who’s taking part in the conversation and where, exactly, it’s all going. As a result, spiritual seekers looking for enlightenment from this experimental volume will have to work hard to find it.
A high-reaching work on spirituality that lacks cohesive narration.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-64045-858-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: LitFire Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 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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