Passionate and provocative, with or without devilment.
A New Jersey clinical social worker warns against a satanically orchestrated, technology-driven narcissistic evil overtaking an increasingly godless country.
Battenhausen (Defeating Depression: The Calm and Sense Way to Find Happiness and Satisfaction, 2011) defines Socialcide as loving ourselves to death and says that Satan has been on a roll since 1978—“the year the beast and the creator of Socialcide signed his plan to seduce people into killing themselves emotionally, and destroying all that is good and loving in the world.” That was the year, he notes, of the first home video games and cellular mobile phones—the devil’s tools for spreading narcissism. “[P]eople born between 1978 and 2000 are more narcissistic than people born into every other generation in history,” he laments. Common social virtues, basic morality, face-to-face communication and caring about others have been swept aside as the self-absorbed young immerse themselves in cyber realms. The plan is to “[s]top communication and replace it with technology,” Battenhausen says, and to turn people into machines. Some of these terminally narcissistic imps, stripped of humanity, will and have become monsters. He offers as examples young mass murderers—the worst of the worst from Columbine to Sandy Hook—with penchants for creepy websites and violent video games. Others, sinking deeper into narcissistic cocoons, resent that their superiority is not recognized. They are disrespectful to teachers and contemptuous of parents who may themselves be narcissists and uninvolved in their children’s lives. And there is no God anywhere. Even without accepting Battenhausen’s fundamental thesis that Satan is running the show, it’s hard to argue with his powerfully presented case that too many children are growing up in horribly dysfunctional ways. This eminently readable but overlong book could be cut by a hundred pages without damage to the author’s message that belief in God and better parenting are the only salvation. Dogs, as it turns out, loom large in the author’s appraisal of what’s still good in the world. Dog is God spelled backward for a reason, he suggests. And does the slavish adoration we get from these creatures feed our narcissism? Clearly the author, who has four Saint Bernards, doesn’t think so.
Passionate and provocative, with or without devilment.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1939761279
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Faith Books and More
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2014
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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