A book provides a beautifully rendered introduction to a remarkable healing initiative and a useful tool kit.
The founder of SafeArt, which focuses on creative expression to prevent and heal abuse and other traumas, discusses its genesis and methods in this debut educational guide.
The author begins her book with “Coming To,” her monologue about being “reborn” at age 30 by finally leaving her emotionally abusive husband, which is also the “story that led to the creation of SafeArt.” She came to realize that having the courage to take dance classes at 20 and then expressing herself through that discipline greatly aided her healing journey, a tactic that she now applies and expands on via SafeArt’s various arts-focused workshops and activities. In this guide, Penfield (co-editor: On Our Way: An Anthology of SafeArt Writing, 2000-2010, 2016, etc.) discusses her organization’s key principles. They include the need to trust one’s gut instincts regarding abusive situations and to be accountable in responding to them, which means taking responsibility and following mandated reporting procedures when a witness to abuse. She also touches on how the brain deals with trauma, drawing on scientific sources, and, in what constitutes the bulk of this volume, outlines the various “explorations” or arts activities that have proved effective for SafeArt. They include having workshop participants imagine and then draw the different compartments of their brains as a way to understand the responses that can happen in the face of abuse. Penfield deftly weaves an array of SafeArt participants’ works (poems, drawings, etc.) as well as many personal journal entries into her commentary, with several appendices of workshop outlines and tools as well as an additional resource list completing the book. She has created a lovely multimedia narrative that gently leads readers into SafeArt’s world, with its case-study stories and contributed illustrations serving as a mirror and testimony to the impact and value of this wonderful organization. The volume’s backmatter then presents practical takeaways for implementation. While some readers may prefer a more straightforward, blueprint approach, the exploratory nature of this work remains both appropriate to SafeArt’s mission and well worth the odyssey.
A book provides a beautifully rendered introduction to a remarkable healing initiative and a useful tool kit.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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