A comprehensive list of easy-to-implement mental health tips.
In this motivational guide, Sylvester (The Land of Blue, 2017) offers advice on coping with anxiety and depression.
For those who are anxious or depressed, life can be a daily struggle, and the management strategies that work for some people don’t always work for others. Here, mental health counselor Sylvester provides 100 different approaches to banishing anxious and depressive thoughts in a single volume, providing numerous options for those who have yet to find methods that work for them. She suggests that those who feel mentally “stuck” should physically “get up and move. Literally, stand up and move out of the space.” One can experiment with dressing differently, she says, in order to show a more confident vision of oneself to the world—and to oneself. A harmless, leisurely “escape” can also help, she asserts, such as an addictive TV show, a hot shower, or an immersive hobby. No matter what method one chooses, she writes, the key is to be proactive: “The only way out of those difficult feelings,” writes Sylvester in her introduction, “is to make the choice to move through those feelings—to learn more about yourself in the process, coming to understand that when you do the work, you become better able to serve.” Sylvester describes herself as a “licensed mental health counselor with a holistic and alternative bent,” and this bent comes through in a number of suggestions. No. 62, for example, is “Get to Know Your Guides,” and these guides are spiritual in nature: “If you’re curious, start asking who guides you. What do they look like? What’s their name? Is your guide an ancestor or an even higher form of being?” This may strike some readers as a bit “out there,” as the author herself notes, but the inclusion of such unorthodox tips alongside more standard psychological fare feels appropriate. After all, Sylvester isn’t offering a one-size-fits-all hat, but rather 100 hats for 100 differently sized readers. Those in need of fresh ideas to tackle their anxiety or depression will likely find at least one or two helpful ideas here, which may be all they need.
A comprehensive list of easy-to-implement mental health tips.Pub Date: May 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9989775-6-0
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Old Tree House Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2019
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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