A sometimes-bumpy buddies-on-the-road account of spiritual transformation.
A former hippie recounts his 1970s encounter with an unlikely spiritual teacher in this debut New-Age manifesto.
Doorlag’s account of his spiritual odyssey opens with a disturbing scene. On a beach in southern Vancouver Island, at the end of a long, deeply affecting journey, his friend and mentor died. Following JJ’s explicit wishes, the author burned his body on a bonfire, then smashed his bones to dust and pebbles with a hammer. It is a strange and grisly beginning to what is essentially a gentle story of spiritual guidance. Doorlag met JJ (whose moniker stands for his most basic directive, “Just Jump”) in the summer of 1975, when he accepted the man’s request to ride with him on a road trip from California to Canada. The author was a long-haired, bearded college student driving a “baby-blue van with rainbow curtains.” JJ was at least a decade older and worn down by a life he refused to talk about. But over the course of their month-long adventure, JJ did expound daily on his spiritual outlook, teaching Doorlag to embrace a worldview rooted in New-Age values of peace, love, and justice as attainable ideals. Rejecting established religions for their reliance on the “supernatural,” JJ set forth a belief in four miracles. Three of these, the creation of the universe, the beginning of life, and human consciousness, had already happened. The fourth, “peace on Earth for all mankind,” was to be achieved by practicing open-mindedness, questioning authority, and caring for other people, animals, and Earth. After imparting his philosophy, JJ asked Doorlag to write it down and publish it, a promise that took the author more than four decades to fulfill. Doorlag’s picaresque narrative evokes the innocent revolutionary ethos of the ’70s, which becomes especially poignant when juxtaposed with the continuing struggles of the “Occupy” movement of a more world-weary millennial generation. JJ’s teachings of the miracles of life and creation and hopes for peace and human connection propose a positive and well-intentioned cosmology with intriguing details. But the lessons are sometimes simplistic and contradictory. For example, in discussing JJ’s vision of the future, Doorlag asserts that “medical advances in the centuries to come would be pure speculation” while nonetheless going on to predict “birth defects, paralysis, brain trauma, cancer, etc. may no longer be an issue.”
A sometimes-bumpy buddies-on-the-road account of spiritual transformation.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73220-441-6
Page Count: 74
Publisher: Mountain Mouth Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 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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