A brief but vivid memoir of a spiritualist.
Rugolo (Eight Practical Steps to Conscious Mothering, 2013) offers a combination of personal recollection and spiritual discussion.
In this latest work, the author tells of her various adventures in the realm of spirituality and the paranormal, involving such phenomena as ghosts, past lives, and clairvoyance. They center most often, though, on the concept of “soul retrieval”—the identification, healing, and release of a wayward fragment of a wandering soul, which has become lodged in a loop of past trauma. “Each of us started in a field of oneness,” she writes. “Over time, the separation of the soul from this field of oneness has occurred.” Rugolo effectively grounds these paranormal observations with selections from her own autobiography; for instance, she mentions how the premature death of her brother gave her a broader awareness of the spiritual realm, and she tells stories of her and her husband, Tony Moch, having various encounters with the spirit world. Rugolo writes about being an on-call spiritual consultant, making house calls to clear out “negative energy” from private homes and advising people on ways to release “stuck” spirits—souls who can’t move on, due to a variety of reasons, including grief, shock, or fear. This forms the bulk of the book’s otherworldly narrative, with Rugolo describing numerous sessions. Overall, a soothing tone of gentleness runs through the entire work, as when she notes that “Helping our spirit brothers and sisters go home is the best choice when given the opportunity.” The author often reflects on how compassion forms the heart of her own story—and not merely compassion for those who’ve passed on: “The process of releasing a karmic lifetime means forgiving the soul who persecuted us or killed us in a past lifetime,” she says. “Sometimes we have to forgive someone else. And sometimes we have to forgive ourselves.” Fans of spiritualist writing will be both intrigued and comforted.
A brief but vivid memoir of a spiritualist.Pub Date: April 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982200-59-6
Page Count: 126
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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