by Mary Bauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2019
An earnest account of what the author calls a “mercury epidemic” in dentistry.
In this debut memoir, educator and advocate Bauer chronicles her and her daughter’s recovery from a variety of maladies, tying them all to a single cause—mercury in her fillings.
In 1993, when the Oregon-based author began suffering from acute light sensitivity, weakness, poor vision, skin peeling, and insomnia, she found no relief from her doctors, who found nothing wrong with her. She found her own answer in an entry describing mercury poisoning in an encyclopedia of alternative medicine. After studying the topic more thoroughly and looking back on her life, she concluded that her many silver fillings, which contained mercury, had been slowly poisoning her since she was 5 years old. The harmful effects, she felt, had likely been transferred to her daughter, Miko, during pregnancy and breastfeeding. The author gradually and creatively reveals these details over the course of this memoir, using the framing device of her visit to a holistic dentistry center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 1994. There, she had all of her fillings replaced and underwent an intense detoxification period which eventually led her back to full health, she says. This allowed her to then focus on young Miko, who suffered from developmental delays and her own array of health problems. With the help of a unique diet, homeopathy, and therapies such as Auditory Integration Training and behavioral optometry, Bauer says, Miko was able to flourish. Bauer is a highly engaging storyteller, which makes her memoir an enjoyable read. However, although she offers a convincing account of her recovery, she doesn’t address why so many other people with similar fillings haven’t suffered the same ailments that she did. Still, she presents her arguments powerfully: “How could putting the second most dangerous element on earth into our teeth be beneficial?” She also discusses the American Dental Association, which, she says, continues to support the use of fillings that contain mercury. Her book won’t convince every reader, but some may come away from this account more curious and cautious about its subject.
An earnest account of what the author calls a “mercury epidemic” in dentistry.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948018-51-7
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Other Mother
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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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