For spiritual seekers, a loosely inspirational invitation to reconsider the role of poetry in life.
A guide to finding meaning and connection through poetry.
Poet and historian Hecht, author of Doubt and The Happiness Myth, launches an ambitious investigation into how spiritually inclined nonbelievers seeking a meaningful alternative to organized religion’s dogma can find it in poetry. “Many of us who are happy to live outside religion still suffer from a lack of things religion gives its members,” writes the author. “It seems to me the remedy to this suffering is a shift in the way we think about ritual and the poetry of our lives.” In laying out the possibilities, she writes, “I want to tempt you to compile a clutch of poems for holidays, events, practices, and emergencies. I’ll show you how to gather and get to know them, how to take them into your daily life and your heart.” Throughout 20 thematically focused chapters—e.g., “On Decisions,” “On Weddings,” “On Coming-of-Age”—Hecht shares anecdotal stories from a wide variety of individuals. As each reflects on their specific struggles or dissatisfaction, the author offers a particular poem as a balm. Though somewhat random, Hecht’s poetry selection is expansive, ranging across centuries and cultures. Among the dozens of poets she enlists are Rumi, Rilke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, Maya Angelou, and Joy Harjo. Hecht’s premise is thought-provoking and intriguing, and the book will appeal to avid readers of Elizabeth Gilbert, Julia Cameron, Anne Lamott, and similar authors. However, Hecht’s writing often lacks those writers’ grounded, open-hearted clarity, and the text, though studded with insightful commentary, often wavers unevenly between conversational guidance and abstruse rumination. “I think if we want to know ourselves and the world we are floating in, we have to risk swimming out past the breaking waves,” she writes. “It’s deep out there, but to switch metaphors, the task is not to solve anything, but to find out what happens when we try to live the questions.”
For spiritual seekers, a loosely inspirational invitation to reconsider the role of poetry in life.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780374292744
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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