An expressive, if sometimes elusive, assortment of thoughts and ideas on love.
One man explores the idea of divine love through his collection of poetic musings, meditations, and observations.
Mihal’s examination of love’s divine nature comprises four parts. The first, “Daily Meditation: Her,” begins with dated excerpts that start on August 7, 2019, and introduces readers to the unidentified “Her.” Each entry consists of anywhere from a half-page to multipage snippets of thought. Although Mihal spends much time discussing his feelings for Her (“I try to remember at what point my heart became irreversibly touched by her soul image”), this feeling often bleeds into a more expansive concept of “divine love”—also referred to throughout as “The Goddess Within.” The second section, “Daily and Walking Meditation: Seoul—South Korea,” loosely follows the narrator’s time in Seoul as he contemplates things like the need to feel grateful when “the beloved” accepts the gift of offered love. Part three, “Deep Meditation and Visions: Thoughts of Enlightenment,” dabbles in more concrete language and practical advice for readers. Mihal defines mantra, for example, and demonstrates how the idea exists across multiple religions under different names (Hesychasm for Christianity, Sufism for Islam, Bhakti Yoga for Hinduism, etc.). The last section, “Memories of My ‘Self,’” expresses Mihal’s belief that everyone has the ability to change their reality through dreams. He then recalls a handful of dreams that have stuck with him: “I saw the arguing guy’s face so close that the details were like being in reality…And I had the impulse to Matrix out of this environment and push his car like in those damn movie effects.” Sprinkled throughout are occasional quotes from people like Maya Angelou and Mother Teresa, as well as “inspiring music” suggestions, like “Hey Laura” byGregory Porter.
Mihal creates mini prose portraits of feelings and moments that trace the nuances of his emotions, some of which will likely be familiar to others (“Time becomes a value more appreciated than anything else when feeling kind or loving someone in moments of togetherness”), while others are more abstract (“Warmth, happiness and the echo of eternity make a point in a vacuum. Your soul is bathing in those feelings encapsulated in a simple word like ‘Love’”). While the blend of poetic reflections and meditations are beautiful, the writing ultimately leans too heavily on the vague, sometimes indistinct musings of the author. Passages often contain terms and phrases that haven’t been fully fleshed out (“soul message,” “soul dreaming,” etc.). Even the sections that attempt some sort of narrative thread, like those in the Seoul section, are very much open to interpretation: “After the movie, being close to my beloved friend, Han River, hearing its calling to talk over a walk meditation along with the Wind and Sun all day long was a stroll through the veil of time.” Mihal’s overall message—embrace the vastness of love and use the physical and spiritual selves to reflect it to others—is an uplifting and admirable one. Regrettably, that message gets lost among inexact phrasing and structure.
An expressive, if sometimes elusive, assortment of thoughts and ideas on love.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781068630026
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Mystic Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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