For devotees of both Dyer and self-help books, an inspirational account of the essence of the man behind Your Erroneous...
A self-help guru’s reflections on how he became who he is.
Self-empowerment is one key to success in life, and nowhere is this more evident than in Dyer's (21 Days to Master Success and Inner Peace, 2012, etc.) rich unfolding of his life stories. From some of his earliest childhood memories in the early 1940s to the present, Dyer takes readers on a nearly year-by-year trip through the events in his life that led him to write more than 40 books and undertake other projects related to self-development. Each action, he writes, often directed by a divine force, put him one step further on the path of becoming the man he knew he was meant to become. For years, he questioned the people and books influencing him, but he continued to follow an inner knowledge that connected him spiritually and emotionally to the world around him. Dyer writes, "It no longer takes years for me to have this insight—everything and everyone are connected to each other and to the Tao or the universal one mind from which all things originate and return." Dyer addresses the fears and setbacks that he encountered along the way, including the need to find his absentee father, whose abandonment filled Dyer with anger for years. Only at his gravesite was the author able to forgive the man and "[cleanse his] soul of the toxicity that living with internal rage brings." Every emotional experience was another pivot point for Dyer, and from them, he produced his best-selling books, audiotapes and lectures. The author’s reflections on the twists and turns of his authentic life reveal the power inherent in each of us to have the same joyful existence, though many of his pronouncements may be too far out there for many readers—e.g., “There is no time; 1968 and 2018 are all one, even though our body-mind sees them as separated by 50 years.”
For devotees of both Dyer and self-help books, an inspirational account of the essence of the man behind Your Erroneous Zones and other self-help titles.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4019-4403-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hay House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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