A fun, easy-to-read guide for those seeking basic advice on living a more balanced life.
A health coach shares tips on living well in this debut self-help guide.
As the single mom of an infant with a variety of health problems, Dorner decided to use diet and nutrition as a way to help her child thrive. She started with experiments in gluten- and dairy-free eating, which eventually led her to enroll at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in New York City, and ultimately start a new career as a certified holistic health coach. She shares what she has learned in a book that’s packed with bite-sized advice, offering the “promise of a fulfilling and healthful life founded on the informed choices you make.” The secrets she reveals run the gamut from the straightforward and sensible (“Exercise. Now. Period”) to the more touchy-feely (“Hug a tree until you embrace nature”). Clever illustrations accompany each secret, which the author briefly explains in a fun, chatty way. This approach makes the book easily digestible; it can be effectively read in small chunks, which will allow readers to easily skim or skip over some of the less revelatory sections. For example, the book explains that cooking an entire week’s worth of meals on Sunday will save time and encourage healthier eating—a “secret” that anyone who’s ever picked up a cooking or health magazine will likely already know. But other pieces of advice are more useful, as when Dorner cautions against relying too much on confusing and potentially deceptive food labels, or discusses the emotions that drive food cravings. Despite the book’s titular reference to nutrition, however, a number of its “secrets” have little to do with diet, including exhortations to recycle more and to use planners to better manage one’s time. Overall, though, this book’s uplifting, positive tone may inspire readers who are looking to make a change.
A fun, easy-to-read guide for those seeking basic advice on living a more balanced life.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0990915522
Page Count: 242
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2015
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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