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THE CALL OF THE DAY

A short, clear exploration of the dimensions of awareness and an encouraging guide for readers seeking spiritual development.

Awards & Accolades

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A manual offers advice on how to reach new levels of enlightenment and peace.

Hershey (Thoughts to Consider with Love, 1992) delivers an easy-to-read spiritual book about consciousness and the movement to a higher dimension through chakras, meditation, and other practices that lead to awareness. She begins by addressing readers who need basic definitions of terms related to the field of energy and vibrations. She explains dimensions and frequency, focusing on helping readers comprehend the bridge from the third to the fourth dimension. The author notes that readers will understand the shift into the fourth dimension when their perceptions of past, present, and future start to blend. The fourth dimension is marked by presence and timelessness, a feeling of lightness without worry, anger, trepidation, or other negative emotions generated by thoughts of the past or fears of the future. The guide also explains chakras, noting that the fourth one, the heart chakra, is a place where individuals will find a sense of home and truth. She examines the other chakras and their roles in the movement between dimensions. One of the most captivating features of the book is the concise lists Hershey provides to delve into such concepts as the ego versus the soul: “The ego needs purpose—the soul does not need purpose. The ego tends toward fixation—the soul is fluid.” These comparisons are particularly useful for readers attempting to identify their own traps and patterns of thinking. Another intriguing topic is essence versus personality, which the author deftly illustrates through her narrative and descriptions. Employing personal stories and a strong, compelling voice, Hershey steers readers out of anxiety and into positive change. Overall, the manual is successful at taking complex subjects and making them accessible to readers.

A short, clear exploration of the dimensions of awareness and an encouraging guide for readers seeking spiritual development.

Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-9973138-0-2

Page Count: 134

Publisher: Joy Journey of You

Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2019

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IN MY PLACE

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

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

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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