Lively, appealing, and instructive; perfectly targeted to the millennial demographic.
A memoir/self-improvement debut offers millennials advice for living a full life.
Early on in this coming-of-age story, millennial Darrow says he faced life-changing events in his mid-20s. His parents divorced, remarried, and dealt with dual cancer diagnoses; his father died; he endured a breakup with a special girlfriend; and he closed his restaurant business after just one year. While devastating, this period also helped shape the author’s life philosophy, delivered with aplomb in a book that catalogs his developing maturity and provides contemporaries with wise tips for thriving. Insightful and rich with details, the guide is cleverly divided into seven sections, each representing an overarching attribute, such as “Wise Millennial,” “Healthy Millennial,” and “Adventurous Millennial.” Every section includes several chapters through which Darrow weaves his personal story in combination with what he learned as he survived each experience. In “Social Millennial,” for example, the author recounts how he loved and lost a girl “TO WHOM I WAS READY TO PROPOSE.” After she breaks up with him, a pensive Darrow reflects, “Don’t take anyone, or anything, for granted. Because they can be gone in an instant.” Later, with a great deal of charm and wit, the author advises men “how to truly win over women,” suggesting, “It boils down to this: treat girls with respect.” The book is wide ranging, touching on many areas, including health, wealth, relationships, college, and business, all written from millennial to millennial. Darrow’s prose is engaging and at times exhilarating. He is an adept storyteller and demonstrates the ability to learn from his challenges, failures, and successes. In addition to the manual’s natural, conversational style, the design is striking: Each section is dramatically set off with its own vivid hue, and numerous uncredited color photographs supplement the text. The author’s astute observations about his own generation are refreshing if not unique: He claims millennials “tend to use technology as a crutch to express their true feelings” but “will fight to the digital death for expressive freedom.”
Lively, appealing, and instructive; perfectly targeted to the millennial demographic.Pub Date: April 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73363-311-6
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Happy Wellness, Inc.
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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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