An upbeat, if sometimes-familiar, manual for self-discovery.
This inspirational self-help book for women offers a cheerful yellow brick road to a new life.
In his famous 1949 book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell theorized that, in literature, all mythical heroes’ journeys have a similar structure. Organizational development consultant and executive coach Liller (Circle Power, 2010) details how women may start their own life-changing journeys in this accessible guide. Her inspiration for writing this book occurred while watching a speaker’s presentation that compared Campbell’s theory to Dorothy Gale’s journey in The Wizard of Oz. Liller sprinkles references to the wide-eyed girl from Kansas throughout the text as she urges readers to realize that, like Dorothy, they’ve been the heroines of their own stories all along. A heroine doesn’t have to leap over tall buildings in a single bound, writes Liller; instead, she can simply be a woman who dares to take risks and challenge herself even when it’s frightening to do so. This breezy manual begins by defining some terms; for instance, a person is in the “Belly of the Whale” when they find themselves in turmoil during a journey of self-discovery. As Liller urges women to begin their own quests, she provides basic rules of the road, such as “it’s OK not to know where you’re going next.” She also offers practical tools that are easy to use, such as a “Heroine’s Journey Map” for recording milestones. For readers who have no idea what they want to do in the future, there’s a hands-on exercise that involves free-writing ideas on sticky notes and grouping similar ideas together; the aim is to help women to see previously unknown patterns in their lives. Although the book is relatively short, Liller’s friendly voice is inviting, and her examples are often compelling. Comparing life to a journey is a cliché, and some of the exercises—such as affirmations—have been done many times before. But women who are searching for a first step to change will find some solid ground under their feet here.
An upbeat, if sometimes-familiar, manual for self-discovery.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-945847-07-3
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Emerald Lake Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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