An in-depth, intellectually stimulating relationship guide that manages to be conversational and clear in its delivery.
A debut manual challenges readers to explore the “unwanted self” and how it affects relationships, conflicts, and perceptions.
Neufeld skips past the traditional conflict-management advice readers often find in self-help books, diving straight into the core of what ignites clashes in relationships. Having little to do with the dynamic between two people, conflicts actually arise, the author explains, from the sore spots and perceptions of the unwanted self. Looking at expectations and desires, she encourages readers to reflect on feelings sparked by relationship battles that might be rooted deeply in early beliefs formed about themselves: both the ideal and the unwanted selves. Rather than advocating basic listening and expressing patterns, the author suggests internal questioning and self-reflection that deeply examine the positive side of conflict: its power to propel individuals toward progress and constructive change. The author recommends that readers pause and consider how they create trouble in relationships, stating the specific causes and identifying the behaviors. This serves as a catalyst for choosing growth and change instead of the same patterns. In an incisive chapter entitled “Warming Up to the Unwanted Self,” Neufeld deftly describes the tension between the desires of the self and the fear of becoming the unwanted, rejected version of the self. For example, the author uses this juxtaposition: “I want to be a passionate lover but that makes me feel guilty and self-indulgent. Not being able to let go makes me feel like an inadequate lover.” This clear naming of the struggle between the self and the ego is what distinguishes this book from others in its genre. Rather than quick solutions for better communication, Neufeld offers powerful tools for self-reflection and personal metamorphosis. By defining those triggers that repeatedly produce fights, readers can self-actualize, resulting in improved relationships with others. Another of the book’s strengths is its avoidance of binaries and its dedication to studying the positives and negatives of common themes like shame, criticism, and rejection. “How much should we care about what people think?” she asks. “When we seek an answer to this question by navigating between the polarized positions of caring too much and not caring at all, we enact a necessary internal struggle.” The manual culminates in a chapter on how to deal with others differently by embracing new self-awareness and relationship aspirations.
An in-depth, intellectually stimulating relationship guide that manages to be conversational and clear in its delivery.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5255-1406-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2017
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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