A warm-hearted New Age guide to well-being, mixing practical wisdom with soulful effusions.
Addison offers advice for channeling spirit guides in this self-help book.
The author begins by recounting her journey into spiritualism, which reached a milestone on September 22, 2018, when she began direct communications with spirit guides Kevin, a gentle, kindly, male energy; Florence, a vivacious, fun-loving, female energy; and “Sh”eila, a bustling, nurse-like energy. She goes on to provide readers with steps for developing their own spiritual practices. These include meditative visualizations of a wilderness waterfall and a golden light that infuses one’s body; a medley of prayers; and a mindfulness exercise in which one contemplates everything that goes into eating a tomato—from the tomato seed to the sunshine and rainfall that nourish it to the grocery-store shelving that displays the ripened fruit to the debit card that purchases it to the mouth that relishes it. The bulk of the text reprints 366 messages from her guides; their content ranges from fitness tips (“[w]alk 10,000 steps daily or do cardio for thirty minutes at least five days per week”) to soothing lifestyle koans (“Don’t stress. Just let things be”) to therapeutic abstractions (“Don’t be afraid of change. Change is good”). In later chapters, the author urges readers to sign an “annual abundance contract” that petitions the universe to grant one’s desires in exchange for commitments to be a good person, undertake steady self-improvement, and accept a “World Challenge” to donate one percent of one’s income to charity. Addison and her spirit guides reassure readers that they can escape their ruts of negativity in elegant prose that moves from firm confidence-building (“You know you can do this, and you know this is something you have to do”) to frank parental scolding (“[c]lean up your bedroom and closets”) to rapturous mysticism (“Every heart is a heart of God”). Readers seeking a vigorous jolt of uplift and motivation will find it here.
A warm-hearted New Age guide to well-being, mixing practical wisdom with soulful effusions.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781039155626
Page Count: 223
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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