A wonderfully inviting guide that reminds readers that calm breathing is the center of life itself.
A debut manual focuses on personal transformation.
This book by Chelec Cafritz is deceptively wide-ranging given its comparatively slim page count, as the author lays out a calmly worded, comprehensive life guide that begins with a series of health mishaps. While tending her new baby, she began to experience severe neck pain; she went to a doctor, who advised her to stop looking up. After years of tolerating this persistent pain, she tried a “gentle” yoga class to help deal with the problem. At these classes, she began to experience terrifying incidents her physician characterized as “anxiety attacks.” And in an attempt to treat those episodes, she went to a “breathworker.” Through “conscious breathing,” Chelec Cafritz formed an entirely new worldview. She describes herself in this manual as having been “high-strung, something of an overachiever” without “a woo-woo bone in my body,” but “conscious breathing” changed her outlook on life. “Each inhalation, each exhalation, can be a pathway to joy, to love, to living a full and authentic life,” she writes. “Each breath links us directly to our minds, our hearts, and our souls. There is no such thing as an unimportant breath.” One strand running throughout the rest of the volume consists of useful advice on how readers can learn breathwork themselves: “Try and create slow, steady calm breaths. Feel the floor under your feet. Feel the back of the chair supporting you.” The other major strand deftly explores the insights that the author gleaned as a result of her practice of conscious breathing. Among other things, the method heightened her awareness of the “numbing” effects of long-standing, unexamined habits. Eventually, she began taking on breathwork clients of her own and included here are some memorably touching anecdotes. Chelec Cafritz’s prose throughout is exuberantly readable, with a wry self-awareness that’s often missing from books of this kind. Even nonpractitioners should find themselves breathing easier for reading these pages.
A wonderfully inviting guide that reminds readers that calm breathing is the center of life itself.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73379-554-8
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Warren Publishing, Inc.
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
