An often engaging book that uses wit and wisdom to connect women to a sense of divinity.
A reverend offers a how-to guide for unleashing one’s inner goddess.
Brockway opens her discussion by analyzing the Garden of Eden from alternative perspectives, reframing the biblical Eve as a liberator. She then presents her views on 36 female spiritual figures, each of whom, she says, offer women pathways to fulfilling their potential, divided into five categories: “Self-Empowerment and Strength,” “Love and Romance,” “Family Life and Friendship,” “Work and Finances,” and “Play and Lightheartedness.” These heroes include famous goddesses, such as Venus, representing self-appreciation, and Isis, channeling the healing of relationships, as well as lesser-known figures, such as White Buffalo Calf Woman, symbolizing sacred female leadership, and Brigid, embodying creativity and inspiration. Brockway also includes Christian religious figures, such as the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Saint Térèse, uniting them through themes of female encouragement and strength. Brockway ultimately offers a book about self-love, encouraging women to connect with a more genuine sense of beauty and power than mainstream media offers. Brockway offers a diverse pantheon, including divine women from Asia, Africa, and northern Europe, and she adds a practical element to an otherwise esoteric work, proposing self-care activities to help one “connect” with these divines, including affirmations, mantras, healing baths, runes, and meditations. Furthermore, Brockway’s work uses accessible language that adds color and humor to the narrative, bringing the goddesses to life. That said, this is not a history text, and much of the content is focused on simply portraying the goddesses as symbols of feminine inspiration. Some readers may also find the largely heteronormative tone lacking in inclusivity. For the most part, however, readers are likely to enjoy Brockway’s affirmative text.
An often engaging book that uses wit and wisdom to connect women to a sense of divinity.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-941630-20-4
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Goddess Communications
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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