The lessons of a Sri Lankan holy man allow a woman to transform pain into faith in a work that delivers inspiration more...
A debut self-help book mixes recollections and religious instruction.
After a 1998 car accident left her with damaged nerves and chronic pain, Schelling realized she had to use her faith to change her situation. She delved into the spiritual lessons she had learned during her decade studying with Sri Lankan holy man M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. Several mystical experiences followed her rational exploration of her beliefs, including seeing her own glowing green “light-body, or the soul that is one with God.” Schelling soldered a new connection to the inner guide in her heart and thereby discovered the secret to managing the symptoms of her pain. Her desire to help others manifested in the creation of this book, which she completed in a matter of days. Bawa’s nondenominational spiritual tenets form the foundation of the work, though they become more prominent in the instructional section. The guide portion is accompanied by several sprinkles of specific steps, such as understanding life is a gift, and advice on working with breathing. Schelling’s central metaphor is the inner heart as a plot of land, fitting, since the key to liberation, the author writes, “resides within our very own hands and heart.” The narrator switches from a lively first person to a subdued third person with the move from memoir to instruction. The prose strives to be inclusive but sometimes falls flat: “Many religions exist,” and “No one can say that difficulties are not difficult.” Concepts such as negative energy and life without faith are rendered too abstractly to have much impact. “We all share the common experiences that comprise life in this world” offers the “Life without Faith” section. The book’s modest size counters Schelling’s multiple aims, which include helping others to “discover the exaltedness of our birthright.” But the author’s sweet and sincere personal encounters with the divine bring the high-minded spiritual concepts comfortably down to Earth.
The lessons of a Sri Lankan holy man allow a woman to transform pain into faith in a work that delivers inspiration more than guidance.Pub Date: July 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9905920-0-6
Page Count: 84
Publisher: Coaching for Resonance
Review Posted Online: March 3, 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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