Spelldown: The Big-Time Dreams of a Small-Town Word Whiz Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I confess that I am a personal friend of the author, Karon Luddy. I have known her since 1976, and she was a student in several of my English classes. What follows is a paragraph I wrote to her after reading SPELLDOWN. The "crummy little novel" remark was just part of our competing-authors banter from previous emails. WARNING -- the end of the paragraph contains a "spoiler" of sorts. My recommendation: buy it and read it.
"I am so proud of you. Your crummy little novel is absolutely brilliant. I'm a thousand percent jealous! I loved every page, every paragraph, every sentence. The wordplay is mind-boggling! It is so intelligent, so beyond intelligent. But mostly I just loved Karlene. Right from the beginning, so intelligent and independent-minded, half-child, half-adult manque, an astute observer, and yet she does the dishes without complaint and chops down and hauls home and decorates a Christmas tree without feeling sorry for herself. The details you incorporated make it all seem so undeniably real, and Southern, and personal. And I love that at the heart of the novel is the girl's search to understand love, especially family love. She's surrounded by it, immersed in it, but can't comprehend it. At the end, she seems to let go of the need to get an intellectual grip on it and just accepts it, happy that it's real."

Click Here to see more reviews about: Spelldown: The Big-Time Dreams of a Small-Town Word Whiz

Click here for more information about Spelldown: The Big-Time Dreams of a Small-Town Word Whiz

Read More...

The Forgiving Self: The Road from Resentment to Connection Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I found this book perceptive and personally helpful.
Robert Karen is careful, at the beginning of the book, to make clear his intentions. He is not using forgiveness as a blanket application nor is he discussing the forgiveness of great atrocities (the Holocaust, 9/11, etc.) or the forgiveness of such terrible violations as sexual, physical and verbal abuse. He is exploring, rather, forgiveness as a step towards wholeness: the recognition that people can be both lovable and infuriating, that we ourselves can be flawed and yet worthwhile. Karen is encouraging the reader to move beyond "good guy--bad guy" tags, to accept that people--our parents, ourselves--can be imperfect without being the enemy.
This acceptance and recognition, Karen makes clear, is a process. He is not advocating forgiveness as something easy or instantaneous or even, sometimes, appropriate. Forgiving, from Karen's point of view, is a dialog, whether it is a dialog with another person or with our past. The hallmark of this kind of forgiveness is honesty--to honestly admit, "This is how I feel, this is what I'm doing, this is what I experience." Karen is not interested in "fixing" problems: "Okay, I won't do, feel, experience that anymore." He is interested in illustrating the achievement of being able to say, "Okay, I feel this envy or this malice. I don't like it. That's also part of me. I'm a whole person."
Wholeness is the object of Karen's book: how to achieve personal wholeness through recognizing the potential wholeness in other people: "I can still love someone even though they are flawed." In this, Karen accesses a deep truth, call it religious or ethical or whatever (and why should religion and ethics be removed from mental health?): to try to act towards others how we would like them to act towards us.
Karen uses a number of movies, books and current events as examples. Although some of these are applicable, and they are all very interesting, these object lessons are less credible and less applicable than his therapy work and personal experiences.

Recommendation: Buy it.

Click Here to see more reviews about: The Forgiving Self: The Road from Resentment to Connection

Click here for more information about The Forgiving Self: The Road from Resentment to Connection

Read More...