An encouraging playbook for would-be demon-slayers.
A handbook for personal empowerment that concentrates on life’s demons and how to fight them.
The latest in Dunblazier’s (The Demon Slayer’s Handbook, 2015) series continues to offer personal anecdotes about her struggles as a psychic and spiritualist, as well as an account of the demons that she believes inhabit the mortal world. “There is a connection between people and demons,” she assures readers, and she structures her latest handbook around five parables (“the stories of the spirit guides that have worked with me in this lifetime and for some over many lifetimes”) and five “basic levels of perception”: physical, etheric, emotional, mental, and causal. Dunblazier focuses on encouraging her readers to remain vigilant in the face of the world’s evils, and to marshal the resources that are at their disposal, which include calm introspection, self-possession, and even good humor: “One of the things I know is that when you’re facing the devil head-on, or running for your life, fear is your friend—but not completely,” she writes in one of the book’s many pleasing, counterintuitive moves. “Your fear will eventually turn on you.” The author returns periodically to her own history with her spirit guides, but the main thrust of her book is a set of upbeat propositions about living in the moment and mastering one’s unruly inner world. These are aimed squarely at fellow spiritualists but are also applicable to a wider audience that’s prepared to see demons as metaphors. “Demons are energy, and energy doesn’t go away,” she warns readers, “it changes form”—hence, her emphasis on being alert and ready for anything. Using a potent combination of mystical concepts, including chakras and past lives, Dunblazier creates a guidebook that assures readers that they have the tools to defeat their own demons. The overall ideological framework can feel jumbled at times, but the central message of empowerment will appeal to spiritual seekers.
An encouraging playbook for would-be demon-slayers.Pub Date: May 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9963907-4-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: GoTracee Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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