A book presents emboldening ideas to help readers deal with dysfunctional mother-daughter relationships.
From the volume’s start, Anderson (AFTER The Before & After, 2011) writes from a place of personal wisdom and resolved knowledge. Her detached objectivity rings clear throughout as she provides simple strategies that employ complex psychological exercises in practical ways. For example, she begins the work by describing a triangle of “victim consciousness”—victim, persecutor, rescuer. Many readers trapped in flawed mother-daughter relationships will likely recognize these roles. Anderson provides exercises to break from this pattern, including journaling and listing. The volume also suggests living through emotions rather than judging or pushing them away. Through this concept, the reader can explore which emotions arise from memories or interactions with a dysfunctional, often manipulative mother. And, by allowing the emotions to make their brief stay, the reader can become aware of ways to accept rather than reject the feelings. Yet perhaps one of the book’s most potent features is the way Anderson explains boundaries. They are not devices that will change the way others will treat a person, she explains, and perhaps that’s the most widely misunderstood idea about setting boundaries. Boundaries, she notes, are actually commitments to oneself and one’s own integrity. They are behavioral limits—meaning whether one reacts to certain things or responds to particular kinds of remarks. Anderson breaks down boundaries into two parts: requests and consequences. She explains that it is not a mother’s job to respect a daughter’s boundaries: it is the daughter’s duty to follow through and enforce the consequences she sets. The book is enlightening, clear, and concise and should be helpful to readers struggling with the helpless feelings of a manipulative relationship with a parent who seems impossible to sever from their lives without severe consequences. A later chapter discusses “mother” as a verb rather than a noun. Following the wisdom of author Martha Beck, Anderson asserts that readers are being mothered whenever they are accepted, nourished, instructed, or empowered. Once they detach the idea of motherhood from a particular person, she explains, they are free to receive it from all around—including from themselves. This is perhaps one of the most enlightening moments in the book, and readers will likely gain lasting insights from this poignant, stirring read. This short, forceful work about mother-daughter dynamics gives clear pathways to relief and empowerment.
Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-942646-85-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Difference Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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