A clear, detailed plan to seize joy in life that offers some familiar tips.
A numerology-based guide realigns personal habits in order to increase happiness.
Hadden’s (In the Mind of Revenge, 2017) manual emphasizes that people tend to block their own joy. “I want you to remember that you are Joy,” she writes. “I want you to distinguish between who you are (Joy, whole, divine, eternally loved) and how you feel (depressed, angry, confused, excited, anxious).” “If you can do that,” she continues, “it won’t matter when you have a bad day or hit a bump in the road.” The bulk of her book consists of 21 “Joy Builder” activities, each designed to last 21 days under “the popular idea that it takes a minimum of 21 days to form a habit.” The author explains that although the real window of time is much longer, “21 still feels right” because it’s three weeks, doable, and not overwhelming. These Joy Builder exercises sometimes revolve around deceptively simple changes—swap “should” for “could” in daily talk (in order to emphasize personal effectiveness instead of guilt or obligation), for instance, or remove “but” from the daily vocabulary. Others consist of basic reminders, such as “Be steadfast in your boundaries and flexible with your empathy” and “Being friends on Facebook is not being friends in real life. Being friends in real life does not mean you have to be ‘friends’ on Facebook.” Many people do things they dislike every week, Hadden observes, and her useful exercises are distinctly designed to counteract this and put the emphasis back on positivity. “Every time you feel grateful for the next 21 days,” she advises at one point, “say so, and be specific.” Most of the author’s advice is recognizable and simple to the point of being self-evident—telling readers that staying affirmative is important and that taking time off is a necessary basis for experiencing happiness. Ultimately, the reminder “You are the joy you seek” becomes the book’s vibrant mantra—one that many readers will no doubt find helpful.
A clear, detailed plan to seize joy in life that offers some familiar tips.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-46685-9
Page Count: 142
Publisher: Alodia Offbeat Creative, LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2019
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
