A commendable guide for finding meaning after considering suicide—from the heart of a survivor.
A suicide survivor shares her conviction that the Christian faith can overcome a suicidal past.
As a pregnant 14-year-old, Shanks felt she had nowhere to turn and attempted to end her life—but she survived. The ensuing kindness of her sister and of an older Christian woman who took her in led Shanks to realize that life was worth living. Looking back on her ordeal nearly three decades later, Shanks credits God for saving her life, changing her direction and sustaining her through the years. This book is an attempt to share her sense of hope and joy in the wake of near-tragedy. Shanks’ intended audience is suicide survivors—those who have attempted suicide and those who have considered it—and she addresses them from the heart. Chapter headings are drawn from Shanks’ suicidal thoughts, such as “No one truly cares about me!” and “Life is too hard, and suicide is my only escape!” Working from each of these desperate mindsets, Shanks discusses what brings a person to such a point and then provides a Christian answer to the problem, drawing extensively upon scripture. Shanks’ work is, in many ways, an evangelical primer on the Christian faith for the unbeliever or new believer, including an explanation of the Trinity, the basics of salvation theology and an exposition on the importance and role of scripture. The book’s trajectory shows readers that, through faith, they can make sense of, and rebuild, their lives. Some readers may be taken aback by the unapologetically evangelical tenor of the book, while others will be drawn to it through the sincerity of the author. Shanks is completely committed to her faith and to presenting Christianity to the reader in an evangelical manner. Though often unpolished, her writing is accessible and genuine in tenor.
A commendable guide for finding meaning after considering suicide—from the heart of a survivor.Pub Date: June 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-0578054681
Page Count: 141
Publisher: Anchor Distributors
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2011
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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