An approachable fitness guide with sound health tips.
Moor-Doucette (Change Your Thinking, Change Your Body, 2015) shares her secrets on how to look and feel great into your 70s and beyond in this fitness guide.
Inspired by a friend, Moor-Doucette decided to attempt to limit the effects of aging on her body by improving her diet, working out, and focusing her mind with affirmations and visualizations. “All of this would ultimately translate into an inspired and unique training regimen, leading to a succession of Bikini Diva contest wins.” That’s pretty impressive considering the author began all this when she was 68. She was so successful she started working as a life coach and fitness guru; this book represents her accumulated knowledge and advice. The guide contains everything from detailed workout routines and dieting recommendations (down to the nitty-gritty of sugar and coffee substitutes) to mind-improving activities like meditation and journaling. There are beauty tips, including how to make your own skin-care products, including facial scrubs and masks using bananas, papaya, avocado, etc. Though Moor-Doucette writes from her own perspective—and therefore provides advice for those who have passed the age of retirement—the majority of the information pertains to everyone and will be helpful for fitness-minded readers of any age. The prose is highly conversational, and her guidance, which frequently builds on her personal experience, reads as pleasantly neighborly: “We have a stationary bike on our patio that we use when we can’t get to the gym, or just want to ride while watching some TV. My one hundred and three-year-old mother uses it two or three times a week when she doesn’t go into use the bikes at the senior center.” The book’s formatting is a bit basic and monochrome, and though there are a few illustrations breaking up the text, they could be more frequent and inviting. Overall, older readers, in particular, will enjoy these practical, cost-efficient health strategies, most of which can be implemented into daily or weekly routines with little interruption.
An approachable fitness guide with sound health tips.Pub Date: July 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-945949-86-9
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Waterside Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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