A positive guide to body image that reminds readers to first address one’s inner self.
Black encourages readers to let go of their insecurities and embrace their bodies in this debut motivational work.
The author writes that she had body dysmorphic disorder for years, and as a result, her weight fluctuated greatly. She tried yo-yo dieting, fasting, and working out, but because of her low self-esteem, she couldn’t find a weight-control strategy that worked. Her outlook needed to change, she realized: “when you truly learn to love yourself as you are, it’s actually easier to be physically healthy,” she writes in her introduction to this body positive guide. “The love you feel for yourself causes you to want to take care of your body, and the person on the outside begins to reflect the person you’ve cultivated on the inside.” With this book, Black seeks to help readers silence their own negativity, as well as that of others who attempt to shame them for their appearance. Positive body image, she says, requires eliminating self-loathing thought patterns, seizing one’s own agency, fostering self-forgiveness, opening oneself to the possibility of joy, and ultimately loving oneself. Black shares her own experiences with judgmental people, and how she learned to love herself through activities like meditation, therapy, and yoga. Each chapter includes exercises, activities, and a “Mindful Moment”—a short anecdote to help readers change their way of thinking. Black’s prose has a tone that’s both encouraging and pleasantly urgent: “When you find yourself feeling panicky or emotionally distressed, say to yourself, I’m going to be my own first responder.” Her advice has applications that go beyond questions of weight and appearance; indeed, they address insecurities and self-defeating behaviors that are common in many people. The book is also connected to the author’s larger regimen of weight-loss strategies; for example, it concludes with an advertisement for a 21-day “Keto Cleanse.” However, the self-love that she advocates here will be valuable for readers of all body types.
A positive guide to body image that reminds readers to first address one’s inner self.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73273-974-1
Page Count: 155
Publisher: Whole Beauty Press LLC
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2019
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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