A well-executed, if somewhat derivative, motivational guide.
A motivational manual explains how readers can take back control of their lives 15 minutes at a time.
For many people, life has gotten so busy that they can’t afford to make time for a half-hour lunch break, let alone hours for meditation, exercise, rest, and leisure activities. This time crunch goes a long way in accounting for the amount of stress the average person feels in contemporary society. Burke (The Compass and the Clock, 2002, etc.) and debut author de Silva offer a simple solution: a pause. They define this pause “as a sacred time-out for ourselves. 15 minutes helps us to be present, in the moment. When we are present we are more self-aware and can make better choices.” The 15-minute pause, along with self-awareness and conscious choice, forms what the guide calls the “i-Matter Equation,” which, as the name suggests, reminds readers that they matter and helps get them on track to have the sort of lives they desire. The authors devote a section of the book to each element of the equation, explaining the importance of introspection, decision-making, and purposeful action, providing plenty of useful exercises and questionnaires to steer readers into the correct mindset. These activities are quick and fit easily into a 15-minute pause, allowing readers to take a break from the stresses of work and family to analyze the decisions they made in the previous 30 days or to take the Life Energy Inventory. Burke and de Silva write in a clear, soothing prose that always sounds reasonable: “When we don’t value ourselves enough to put us on our own to do list, or find time to prioritize our needs alongside our other demands, then stress levels invariably increase and wellbeing decreases.” As is often the case in books like these, the authors lean heavily on jargon and branding (the Life Energy Inventory is trademarked, of course). There isn’t much in the text that feels completely original. That said, all of the elements of the i-Matter Equation are worthy of pursuit and will likely help alleviate stress for those who incorporate them into their daily lives.
A well-executed, if somewhat derivative, motivational guide.Pub Date: July 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9991794-7-5
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Silver Thread Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2018
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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