A worthy series of upbeat, empowering meditations organized as dictionary entries.
A glossary offers philosophical observations on life.
Garcia begins his nonfiction debut by declaring two suppositions up front: that humans are “infinitely greater than the sum” of their genetics and that there’s much more at work in their lives than their intellects can perceive. But even readers who disagree with one or both of those assertions may very well be tempted to closely examine his book, which is structured along the lines of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. General words are defined and examined for their deeper ramifications, allowing Garcia to expand on a wide variety of concepts, from desire and creativity to death and despair. Running through many of these elaborated definitions is a recurrent reminder to delve beneath the surface of things. In the section on “Disability,” for instance, the author asserts that the whole concept wrongly centers on physicality: “The body is nothing more than a tool and a vessel that is abled or disabled in accordance with the growth needs of the soul.” In the same vein is the entry on “Problems”: “If every problem has a solution, then every solution is buried within the problem itself.” Although his optimism can sometimes lead to overstatements, the tone of energetic positivity he maintains will appeal to readers regardless of their philosophical dispositions. Garcia’s ruminations are suffused with a convincingly nondenominational spirituality. “God is not something you can quantify or put into a formula and come up with a result,” he writes in the section on the deity. “You can’t think God, you can only feel God; thus, God is an experience that remains unprovable to the purely scientific perspective.” But some of the author’s definitions verge on being decidedly odd. He writes, for instance, that feeling guilty about anything is just self-sabotage even though some concerns are obviously justified. Along the same lines, his section on “Confusion” begins: “Confusion is nothing more than being humble and teachable.” Yet most readers will have met at least a few people who are very bewildered without being humble or teachable. Still, his insistence that the audience thoroughly inspect his categories from all angles comes to his rescue time after time, filling his writings with a kind of low-key wisdom. For example, he reminds his readers that addiction is at least as much about an inner lack as it is a particular chemical. And he delivers a long, illuminating section on sex. His choice of structuring the book as a dictionary necessarily makes straightforward, linear reading a disjointed experience—the volume is ideal for random browsing. But his cheerful and forgiving humanism is present everywhere, which helps to bolster the work. “When you place yourself in a humble state of receptivity,” Garcia writes in what might stand as the book’s motto, “you will be astounded to realize that you are not—nor were you ever—alone in this adventure called life.”
A worthy series of upbeat, empowering meditations organized as dictionary entries.Pub Date: July 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73201-359-9
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2019
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
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
