Pithy portions of wisdom well-told.
A lifetime of collected anecdotes in an excellent and entertaining resource for speakers, writers, and storytellers.
Physician, researcher, and speaker Rajah writes that he spent 20 years amassing these 365 parables and is grateful for his early realization that he needed to record these stories because “the faintest ink is stronger than the best memory.” Each month of the year has a theme: e.g., “Philosophy and Wisdom” for January, “Best Humor” for June, and “Inspiration” for December. Most days, the anecdote is accompanied by a brief message and a quote, the sources ranging from Che Guevara and Friedrich Nietzsche to Martin Luther King Jr. and Mark Twain. “Plowing Troubled Land” tells of a Jewish potato farmer sent to a concentration camp while his gentile wife was left to manage the farm. The man wrote his wife a letter and said, “Don’t dare plow the field. There is a lot of hidden hardware buried.” The very night she received the letter, the Gestapo arrived and raided the farm, digging up all the land. The confused wife wrote her husband about the incident, and he replied, “Now plant the potatoes”: after all, “Every crisis represents at the same time an opportunity.” It’s hard to imagine a reader who won’t discover fresh stories in these pages. That said, a few of the stories are overly familiar or commonplace, such as the “Footprints in the Sand” legend in which a man dreams he’s walking on the beach with God. Nevertheless, the well-written book would make a fine resource for anyone needing a brief illustration to share at a church or civic club meeting. While offering a year’s worth of stories, the book never turns tiresome, perfectly illustrating the quote from Winston Churchill that a good speech should be like a woman’s skirt: “long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest”—an apt description of the book itself.
Pithy portions of wisdom well-told.Pub Date: May 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1502462473
Page Count: 470
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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