A practical guide for women on how to find happiness and boost self-worth.
Anderson (When a Sistah’s Fed Up, 2006, etc.) offers advice from one girlfriend to another on life, love and making it.
“[S]uccess is the side effect of making better choices every day,” says the author in the introduction to her breezy yet sensible self-help book. She then sets out to show how some basic actions and attitude adjustments can help turn a humdrum life into a great one. If you can’t get ahead at work, have a man who won’t commit, are drowning in debt or struggling with a health crisis, the author offers words of wisdom. Her “Prescription for Happiness” encompasses 10 tips, including “[p]ursue your passions, not people,” and “[n]ever close your heart unless it’s temporarily under reconstruction.” Each chapter explores a different life lesson in detail (such as “[c]hange your mind often” and “love yourself first”), ending with a useful bullet-pointed summary. Throughout, Anderson, a former columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is perky but stern, and her tone is a mix of you-go-girl optimism and no-nonsense straight talk. But there’s sound advice behind such quips as, “Always act from a position of power, not fear” and “Don’t ignore the yellow lights on the dashboard of your life.” When she bluntly proclaims, “you ain’t Beyoncé,” it’s not a criticism but a counterpoint to the idea that success means excelling at everything. She drives home this concept with relatable personal stories of struggle (such as when she was diagnosed with a rare cancer) and triumph (such as her graduation from dental school). Stories of accomplished women in a variety of fields, including U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and actress Angelina Jolie, help further illustrate Anderson’s lessons as she counsels women to look inward to find their own definitions of success.
A practical guide for women on how to find happiness and boost self-worth.Pub Date: June 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0978637835
Page Count: 190
Publisher: TyMAC books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2014
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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