A provocative manual for achieving happiness that’s punctuated with original, intriguing images.
A debut New Age meditation guide that combines captivating illustrations with suggestions for attaining inner peace.
The academic-sounding title of this work doesn’t adequately convey the idealistic and magical nature of its contents. In an introductory paragraph titled “Sand Dune Poetry,” Link describes his drawings and paintings as “glyphalalia,” a word he derives from “glossolalia”—speaking in tongues. His illustrations seem to radiate a lively spirituality with their abstract figures and invented runic alphabets. The images’ dynamic colors and shapes pair well with Link’s pithy meditations, which often come in the form of instructions: “Surrender. Give up. Accept the fact that you’re not going to solve all the world’s problems.” The illustration for “Transforming the Blessings” is apparently drawn on a paper napkin, with lines and figures leaping off its crinkled edges, as the text instructs, “Thank Mother Earth for giving you a home. / Feel your connection to her gravity.” As the book’s title suggests, the overarching theme is joy, and most meditations do offer a path toward delight. Some are mystical, such as “Sands of Joy,” which bids readers to “Become a Pillar of Light,” while others are distinctly pragmatic: “Keep your agreements. Broken agreements often create guilt and anger.” Even some cynical readers might be tempted by Link’s playful challenge to brighten up a grim roomful of people by silently chanting the word “enjoy.” Occasionally, the text offers tired truisms, such as “Kindness is its own reward,” but more often, it showcases unexpected lines: “Cherish the cavewoman who is your ancestress” or “Sometimes, watching television can create a feeling of joy.” The author’s distinctive vision, coupled with the transcendent illustrations, may make this book a well-thumbed favorite.
A provocative manual for achieving happiness that’s punctuated with original, intriguing images.Pub Date: June 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9909255-0-7
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Coyote Eye Press
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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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