A readable and wide-ranging compendium of New Age nostrums, all presented with a cleareyed vigor that aficionados of the...
A comprehensive guide to achieving greater mindfulness in life.
In her latest book, Nadrich (Says Who?, 2015), a life coach, meditation teacher, and founder of the Institute for Transformational Thinking, urges readers in a busy, modern world of worry to stop, take deep breaths, and embrace a greater degree of mindfulness. The author characterizes the latter as a state that will help them to return to their “conscious homeland.” As the centerpiece of her method, Nadrich advocates a regular practice of “living our truth in the present moment,” and this theme runs throughout the book—specifically, the notion that now is the most important moment of all, and one must live it consciously and lovingly to give one’s life meaning. In such moments, she asserts, people get an opportunity to decide who they truly are and may alter their consciousness accordingly. The book’s brief, highly readable chapters are organized as a sequence of broad concepts, such as “The Future,” “Self,” “Consciousness,” and “Perception,” and each includes meditations that concentrate primarily on its specific concept. Every chapter ends with a koanlike “Note to Self,” as well, usually consisting of just a handful of words. Along the way, readers are always encouraged to focus on the present rather than worry about lost possibilities: “Happiness will continue to elude us,” Nadrich writes, “if we are constantly longing for what ‘could be’ rather than accepting ‘what is.’ ” Readers on the path of self-realization, she says, should always be working to lift “the veils of the inauthentic self” even if, in the process, they end up confronting unwanted truths about themselves. Readers who are already familiar with mindfulness guides will find much of what Nadrich writes in this one to be reassuring. In our path to self-knowledge, she writes in a typical passage, “we strive to meet our full potential, and live true to who we really are”; it’s very comforting to assert that one should strive to be perfect while simultaneously acknowledging that one already is perfect. It’s a win-win scenario and one that readers may have encountered before. That said, not everything in this guide is as hand-holding; for example, Nadrich also warns readers that it’s very hard to lie to yourself when you’re in a state of true mindfulness, and her frequent acknowledgement of the importance of love (“If love is not what sends you out in your day, you will feel something missing, and not know quite what it is”) adds a welcome note of compassion to the book. That said, it does sometimes lean a bit too much on New Age clichés, and readers may feel that some of the author’s statements, such as, “Love is all there is” or her description of Bob Dylan as the “modern version” of William Shakespeare, are a bit overenthusiastic. Overall, though, the tone of the book is one of endearing optimism.
A readable and wide-ranging compendium of New Age nostrums, all presented with a cleareyed vigor that aficionados of the genre will find appealing.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-41596-3
Page Count: 290
Publisher: IFTT PRESS
Review Posted Online: April 8, 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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