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
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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