A slim yet effective volume on how to live the best possible life in a wide range of circumstances.
A concise, elegant self-help book that uses the metaphor of tending a garden to illustrate how to make the best choices in one’s personal and professional life.
With the unalloyed charm of a children’s story, the book begins with two principal characters: the Old Man and the Young Gardener. The Old Man is frustrated by the weeds in his garden, but the Young Gardener urges him to keep weeding. More importantly, he encourages him to accept the fact that he will be weeding for the rest of his life—but that he also has the ability to shape and nurture the exact garden he wishes. Debut author Putnam then embellishes this brief anecdote in a more traditional self-help section. In it, he explains that “[o]nly you can decide which are the Weeds of Meaningless Distraction that you will pull out of your life and which are the Seeds of Positive Purpose that you will choose to grow.” The book continues with this format for another eight chapters, using the Old Man’s and the Young Gardener’s obstacles to illustrate lessons in loss, love and accomplishment. The book outstrips most of its self-help contemporaries in its brevity and excellently matched illustrations. Instead of urging readers to complete a series of exercises or numbered steps, it encourages them to look inward for answers to life’s challenges. This type of thinking doesn’t offer easy answers, but it does foster solidity and growth. Putnam’s direct prose doesn’t seek to impress, but it does succeed in holding readers’ interest while clearly getting its points across. There are an unnervingly high number of capitalized concept names (“Planting the seeds of Respect, Patience, Appreciation and Forgiveness and then nurturing them is often not an easy task”), but it’s no worse than others in the genre. Ultimately, Putnam makes it clear that although true growth is never easy, it’s definitely worthwhile.
A slim yet effective volume on how to live the best possible life in a wide range of circumstances.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1478737490
Page Count: 76
Publisher: Outskirts Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2014
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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