This powerful guide offers journaling exercises that promote alertness, self-healing, reflection, and appreciation.
In this debut manual, a writer examines how journaling can create spiritual, emotional, and intellectual awareness and wellness.
McCarthy understands the ability to overcome internal struggles through self-reflection exercises. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in adulthood, she was forced to relearn basic activities like walking, cooking, and even holding a pen. Through journaling, she discovered the time and patience she needed to heal, inside and out. Her book targets readers who seek a practice that will help them center their thoughts, emotions, and principles daily. The author weaves in personal stories, specific exercises, and useful tips that spotlight the common effects and benefits of journaling, such as putting the “Inner Critic” onto the page, learning to recognize automatic negative thoughts that are products of habits, and transforming the “should” voice into a potent, meaningful one. She recommends many techniques, such as “Morning Pages” and “Night Notes,” that should keep readers tapped into their conscious selves rather than the emotional gusts of the day. McCarthy provides prompts but emphasizes that journaling has few rules. The only ones she suggests: journal by hand and engage in the practice daily. “Putting the pen to paper is a whole body experience,” she asserts, explaining in depth how the journaling process creates a more intimate interaction with the page and forces more succinct, purposeful thoughts due to the physical exertion required. While the book mainly concentrates on journaling, the author also covers an array of other important practices, such as mindful eating, breathing exercises, and expressions of gratitude. She even explains how journaling can become intertwined with healthy eating and other activities that can change a reader’s life if performed daily. In total, the work succeeds at adding something fresh, precise, and compelling to the genre: a focused manual that serves as a coach but allows for freedom, exploration, and creative interpretation.
This powerful guide offers journaling exercises that promote alertness, self-healing, reflection, and appreciation.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-19983-1
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Createwritenow
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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