An earnest attempt to share hard-won lessons about addiction, mental illness, family relationships, and the power of love.
This memoir by a spiritual coach reflects on a life full of hardship and offers insights to readers who may be struggling themselves.
White (365 Ways to Power Up Your Life, 2015, etc.) reports her experience as a Reiki master, a Trinity Table meditation facilitator, and lecturer. She also recounts the challenges that she faced, especially in her younger years, from addiction and family dysfunction; she also tells of her recovery from alcoholism and offers a host of psychological and spiritual reflections on intense periods of difficulty, including dealing with the suicides of her daughter and brother, a house fire, and her own health issues and debt. The memoir often has a diarylike quality, sharing courageous details of painful experiences as well as the author’s reflections on her own oversights and regrets. The book is difficult to follow at times, however; for instance, the narrative begins mentioning regular trips to Bali without providing any cohesive background on how or why this practice started. It also refers to “archetypes” exhibited by the author or those in her life—such as knight, athlete, Goddess, child, or warrior—without providing a comprehensive context for readers unacquainted with them. Late in the book, she devotes several pages to gluten sensitivity and related concepts without any prelude, although she eventually shares her opinion that she, her daughters, and her mother were all profoundly affected by difficulties with gluten and/or sugar. That said, White does succeed at encouraging openness regarding mental illness in families and in society, noting that such illness is, to some extent, part of every person’s experience. Her 30-day challenge for mind, body, and spirit at the end of the book also offers straightforward suggestions for reflection and renewal.
An earnest attempt to share hard-won lessons about addiction, mental illness, family relationships, and the power of love.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4602-9339-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2016
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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