A prayer journal that lacks polish and an effective presentation.
Pollitt offers 500 prayers to God in this Christian volume.
With hundreds to choose from, this debut book contains prayers for all manner of situations and times of difficulty. No table of contents or thematic index is present to guide the potential supplicant, however: Pollitt advises readers to pray before opening this journal so that Jesus will help them select the specific invocation they need that day. Each page begins with a prayer, opening, like a letter, with “Dearest Jesus” and ending with “Thank you Jesus, Amen.” The prayers differ in tone, purpose, and language. Some seek to replicate the formal language of the King James Bible: “Show unto me the beauty and hidden fruits of the spirit in all your holy chosen people and bridle my tongue with angels.” Others are composed in a more contemporary register: “You turned the water into wine, four jugs, 200% pure, changed my income.” Some are curiously specific: “Lord Jesus, thank you for your mighty supernatural matchless power, show unto me new stuff at my present family business.” The majority of each page is given over to blank lines, which are marked as “Sacred space to write your visions on how this prayer has blessed or changed your life.” There are enough lines in these sections that most readers should be able to use the prayers more than once before filling up the space. The fact that Pollitt managed to compose so many discrete prayers is indeed impressive. Even so, the categorization of the devotions and the journaling space beneath them as “sacred” feels a bit exploitative considering how lazily the book is formatted (prayers and lines from one page frequently encroach onto the next) and how many typos are present in the text (“Jobe” instead of Job). While the journaling aspect of the book is intriguing, it casts the act of prayer in transactional terms that some religious readers will likely find gauche. Those looking for daily pre-written prayers can certainly find better crafted alternatives elsewhere, either online or published in volumes smaller than a math textbook.
A prayer journal that lacks polish and an effective presentation.Pub Date: March 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4984-6732-2
Page Count: 508
Publisher: Xulon Press
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2016
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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