An engaging book from an organization with an important, hopeful story to share.
A conflict-resolution organization looks back on the 20 years since its founding.
How does a country pull itself together and achieve peace after overthrowing a dictatorship? Beyond Conflict (formerly named The Project on Justice in Times of Transition) has a simple, bold answer: Let the country’s leaders hear from those who’ve successfully transitioned from entrenched conflicts. If people like David Ervine, a former member of a Protestant Loyalist paramilitary organization in Northern Ireland; and Joaquín Villalobos, former senior commander of El Salvador’s FMLN guerilla movement, can move beyond violence, pain and anger, the organization says, then others can too. The project was first established after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, and its aim is to help leaders “understand the fundamental changes in perceptions and actions that will be required of them if they and their countries are to achieve genuine change.” Over the last 20 years, the project has carried out more than 65 initiatives involving leaders from more than 50 countries. More recently as part of its mission, it began investigating neuroscience and the brain’s role in processing change. Chapters include “The Power of Shared Experience,” “Confronting Dictatorship,” “Changing Mindsets” and “Building Trust Among Enemies,” from contributors such as Phillips, the co-editor and co-founder/chairman of the project; Jan Urban, a Czechoslovak dissident and founding member of the Charter 77 movement; and Monica McWilliams, the founder of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition. The personal stories of transformation from those who have been on the front lines are fascinating; in many cases, it seemed almost impossible to bring the people together to talk, when they would ordinarily not even make eye contact. The book recommends using compromise instead of a zero-sum mentality; finding shared dreams; and making concerted efforts toward achieving justice. The book is hopeful and pragmatic as it presents creative solutions, and honest in its acknowledgment of the difficulties in implementing them.
An engaging book from an organization with an important, hopeful story to share.Pub Date: March 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615790572
Page Count: 105
Publisher: EBS Editoriatle Bortolazzi
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2014
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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