An impassioned, if at times unfocused, plea for making the world a better place by identifying and addressing the...
Part workbook, part memoir, this self-help guide offers a plan for getting beyond trauma-induced pain to enjoy a better quality of life.
According to this manual, honoring “your journey” involves finding a way to make peace with the hand you’ve been dealt in life. A first step is recognizing choices, and how individuals may use “detours” like drugs, self-pity, and depression to blunt the effects of psychic wounds. This first-person narrative contains tools for overcoming mental distress, beginning with how to reframe terrible experiences to let go of damaging emotions like anger and resentment. Other topics include how to build self-esteem and establish boundaries, the value of identifying personal strengths and weaknesses, and the need to express compassion for oneself and others. Special attention is given to the subject of regrets, and how to manage and minimize them to make it possible to move forward in the aftermath of a trauma. To reinforce the content, exercises and questions for self-examination are listed at the end of each chapter. In this book, Gilbert (You Can’t Un-Ring the Bell, 2016), a clinical psychologist, includes personal anecdotes to illustrate her hard-won insights. Though at times she overuses clichés like “be all you can be,” it’s evident she’s carried the burden of treating some of society’s mentally sickest people, including criminally violent offenders and their innocent victims, causing her to suffer from “vicarious post-traumatic stress.” Her outlook is often bleak in spite of the positive message she’s trying to convey; she’s clearly seen the dark side of humanity: “I have actually looked into the eyes of evil on more than one occasion and I’ll never forget it.” Countering her despair is the hope she derives from her strong Christian faith, which she distinguishes from organized religion. Though the book flows well, the organization is loose with occasional repetitions. Still, the author’s sincerity and credibility shine through every section.
An impassioned, if at times unfocused, plea for making the world a better place by identifying and addressing the impediments to good mental health.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4327-7907-8
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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