by Michael J. McKay ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2017
An intriguing, if sales-oriented, guide that back-pain sufferers may find worth considering.
A primer on inversion therapy for back pain.
In his debut, McKay explains how the low-angle inversion table he invented not only provides back-pain relief—by subtly raising a sufferer’s feet higher than his or her head—but also results in “Wellness ‘side-benefits,’ ” such as clearer thinking or increased energy. It would be reasonable for readers to dismiss this work as a thinly veiled sales pitch for the author’s “Gravity Pal” table; indeed, the product is often referenced in the text. Still, for anyone seeking a clear, readable discussion of inversion—an accepted therapy for treating back troubles—and its potential benefits, this book certainly suffices. McKay starts with the expected personal story of his own back pain and subsequent surgery. After he decided to study back-pain relief therapies, he discovered that inversion was not a new idea, but typically, its approach was “higher angle” inversion, which McKay believed was “too scary and impractical.” This led to his invention of a lightweight, portable, low-angle inversion table. However, the primary focus of the book isn’t the use of that product but rather the notion that one needs to take responsibility for one’s own health care. This broadens the author’s objective considerably; he proposes the idea of becoming a “General Contractor of your own health,” explains ayurveda medicine’s “six developmental stages of disease,” and outlines the “four steps to wellness”: coping, progress, overcoming, and celebration. Eventually, the argument returns to inversion, which, McKay claims, can be used both for compression relief and “as a central Wellness tool.” Perhaps the most practical portion of the book is the author’s “toolkit”—a potpourri of techniques and therapeutic approaches that he says he’s used to improve his own well-being, including weight training, acupuncture, salt baths, transcendental meditation, and, of course, low-angle inversion. An appendix offers specific instructions for some of these modalities as well as additional resources. Some of the book’s claims are unsubstantiated, but McKay offers an open invitation to researchers “to determine through objective testing if these results can be independently verified.”
An intriguing, if sales-oriented, guide that back-pain sufferers may find worth considering.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9826615-3-6
Page Count: 241
Publisher: Self-Care Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2018
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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