An often inspiring account that should find a solid fan base, especially among those interested in the teachings of...
A debut memoir detailing the author’s struggle to regain physical health and find internal peace during an arduous trip through India.
In January 2007, just a few days after her new husband, Dan, had returned to the United States, the then-32-year-old Brown found herself in a Mumbai hospital, suffering from inflammation in her knees that left her in excruciating pain and unable to walk. The plan had been for the couple to spend one month together in India on their honeymoon, and then Brown would continue on for several months “to do whatever it was [she] needed to do in India.” It was a spiritual trip, inspired by meditation, which she’d been planning before she met Dan. Although the book is, in part, an evocative travelogue (“Wherever you go in India, there always seems to be smoke in the air, the smoke of meals being cooked on a fire, of cumin and coriander and curry and turmeric egesting from their earthen shells into a man-made creation”), the bulk of the text is devoted to Brown’s personal physical, emotional, and spiritual journey. Although it’s a bit preachy and repetitive, it’s nonetheless a touching chronicle, peppered with humor and raw honesty. Back home, Brown was a nurse, but after severe bouts with dysentery resulted in the swelling in her knees, she says that she was alone and frightened, finding herself, for the first time, totally dependent on the kindness of strangers—including a cab driver, a young woman with the American Civil Services Unit at the American Embassy, and the health care workers and professionals at the hospital. After a few days, an American friend, Ashley, also traveling through India, arrived at her bedside and moved right into her hospital room, providing cheer, sustenance, and, happily, Percocet for the pain. Over the course of the book, Brown relates how she learned to take one step at a time, ever so slowly, and to open herself to accepting the experience, appreciating the moment, and surrendering to what is.
An often inspiring account that should find a solid fan base, especially among those interested in the teachings of mindfulness.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9966166-0-7
Page Count: 218
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 27, 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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