An impassioned and analytic guide to taking control of faltering relationships before they fall apart.
A couples therapist offers a comprehensive guide to maintaining healthy, intimate relationships.
In her nonfiction debut, Elmquist acknowledges at the outset that the “stressors” working on any committed relationship are many, varied, and serious: “Financial obligations and work priorities, life responsibilities and accountabilities, and the daily needs of family and friends [are] all asking for your attention while you and your partner attempt to maintain individual and collective hopes and dreams.” At the heart of her advice is the concept of a “reset,” during which couples are urged to step back and look holistically at the changing nature of their relationship. Elmquist relates the familiar and worrying statistic that most troubled couples wait a very long time—the average is around six years—before seeking out professional therapy. She aims to drastically shorten that interval by equipping couples with the tools they need in order to detect and address problems as they arise. The key is something that Elmquist calls the “Six-Stage Change Cycle of Committed Couple Relationships,” which aims to help couples identify the various evolving stages of their relationship: “You and Me,” “We,” “I and I,” “The We/I Plateau,” “The D-Factor” (involving differentiating one’s personal identity), and “Us or Me.” The author effectively points out that these stages are fluid things, taking different forms with different partners, but she notes that they are nevertheless universal: “We all play each of these roles at one point or another in our relationships,” she writes. “To deny that is to deny we breathe.” Overall, the book’s near-total lack of platitudes and magic bullets is very refreshing. Through the use of ample case studies of her own clients to illustrate her points, Elmquist makes her step-by-step breakdowns immediately applicable to her readers. She also employs a uniform tone of enthusiastic encouragement throughout (“Getting started is the key. Momentum follows action!”), lightening her prescription of hard, detailed work that every committed relationship requires.
An impassioned and analytic guide to taking control of faltering relationships before they fall apart.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9974581-3-8
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Risk
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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