Brief, blunt, and buoyant; offers a refreshing jolt of inspiration.
Braithwaite, who describes himself as “a working-class guy who just wouldn’t give up on his dreams,” debuts with a neatly constructed miniguide touching on some of life’s larger issues.
With short chapters that incorporate salient quotes, anecdotes, and personal reflections, this handbook tackles such far-reaching topics as one’s own uniqueness, choosing to make change, the impact of luck, setting goals, and finding a mentor. None of the material is markedly different from the raft of other inspirational books; in fact, the author references some of these titles in his own book. Rather, this work is distinct because of Braithwaite’s down-to-earth, chatty style combined with his effervescent optimism. Perhaps it’s exaggeration to promise the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee is all that’s required to radically transform, but the author’s point is to quell any fears the reader may have about the scary subject of change. Braithwaite’s observations are smart and insightful, albeit often short on specifics. About originality, he writes, “The most artistic and open-minded people on the planet are our children before they start their formal education cycles. Once in school, our education systems strip away their differences and create a group of ‘normal’ children.” On self-worth: “Understand what your unique quality is and price yourself in the market based on the value that you believe your unique quality is worth.” The author outlines equally perceptive thoughts about resiliency, self-doubt, and one’s personal brand. Braithwaite’s counsel on mentoring is particularly poignant since he relates it to life rather than business. “If you’re missing reassurance and support,” writes the author, “find a mentor who will provide that.” He’s unapologetically bullish on grit and determination and has been inspired by people who faced challenges in their lives. His own life is a testament to overcoming such hardships as divorce, job loss, and homelessness.
Brief, blunt, and buoyant; offers a refreshing jolt of inspiration.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77370-407-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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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