A brief but complex and personal discussion of metaphysical interpretations.
This meditation on metaphysical topics also serves as a tribute to the author’s late wife.
In this short book on spirituality and metaphysics, Renato jumps from personal experience to the texts of major religions to scientific discoveries to art as he explains how his wife, Diana, who passed away in her late 60s, introduced him to new ways of thinking. The concept of déjà vu is defined here as a matter of “gaps” in time and space, or as the author explains, “just as the Deconstructionists use gaps…to begin to explore the truth or ultimate reality behind a text, so too can these gaps in the space and time of the physical universe be used to follow Alice down the rabbit hole, so to speak.” After explaining how Diana encouraged him to re-evaluate his view of the world by developing a different understanding of reality, Renato draws on everything from René Magritte’s paintings to Zen koans to verses from the New Testament to explain his concept of the universe. The theme of light is one of Renato’s driving concepts, and he connects the idea of halos to the Impressionists’ representations of light and Einstein’s discoveries related to the properties of light. At times, the book takes on a memoirlike tone, as Renato shares events from his own life, many of which seem to have a fantastic element to them: “I started to become caught up in my own fame. I started to take pride in the apocryphal stories I had heard about me, no matter how far from the truth they were.” In certain moments, readers might be left wondering whether Renato is telling his own story or whether Diana and the unnamed narrator are instead fictional characters. In the end, Renato’s devotion to Diana—“Now, with help from Diana, I can look, I can see. I can be a good guy again”—seems to be just as important as the metaphysical concepts.
A brief but complex and personal discussion of metaphysical interpretations.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0989718615
Page Count: 97
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2014
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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