A compelling, spirited guide that aims to help readers understand who they come from.
A memoir and New Age self-help guide explores how the traumas of past generations affect present families.
“In this book, I will give you a glimpse into an invisible world,” writes Dayal-Gulati, an Indian-born economist-turned–energy healing practitioner. That world, she says, is one’s “family energy field,” also called “family karma”: an intangible, ancestral link that influences living people of today with the merits and faults of their forebears. Framed this way, everyone lives with the legacies of past generations and can’t unburden themselves from unprocessed trauma without confronting the past; family curses are very real, the author asserts, but can also be broken. Dayal-Gulati’s book is divided into four parts (“Healing My Roots,” “Healing Tools,” “Understanding Your Family Energy Field,” and “The Journey Home”), across which she shares her personal story of spiritual growth and guidance, her advice on the application of healing tools such as flower essences, and tips on how to achieve peace by accepting and honoring one’s ancestors. She peppers the book with anecdotes from her client work as a trained energy practitioner as well as her own life story of moving from India to Europe and finally to the United States while citing therapists, anthropologists, and the work of Carl Jung to effectively contextualize her approach. There are journaling questions, exercises, and guided prayers throughout, with which the author encourages readers to make better use of the book’s principles: “What if the emotions that keep you prisoner may not be your own?” The prose is lively, if sometimes overly optimistic, with ample queries and exclamations that give it a conversational feel. However, one will need to have knowledge and access to their immediate and extended families to fully benefit from this book and practice the rituals it recommends. Dayal-Gulati, who notes that she is not a trained therapist, is also upfront about the parameters of her work, noting that “most of my advice here is for those whose parents were not abusive,” and she recommends seeking the help of licensed professionals for complex trauma.
A compelling, spirited guide that aims to help readers understand who they come from.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-64411-774-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Findhorn Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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An intimate, stirring chronicle.
A daughter’s memories.
Booker Prize–winning Indian novelist Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother. Mary Roy, who raised her two children alone after divorcing her ne’er-do-well husband, was a volatile, willful woman, angry and abusive. In a patriarchal society that oppressed women socially, economically, and legally, she fought to make a life for herself and her family, working tirelessly to become “the owner, headmistress, and wild spirit” of an astoundingly successful school. The schoolchildren respectfully called her Mrs. Roy, and so did Arundhati and her brother. To escape her mother’s demands and tantrums, Arundhati, at age 18, decided to move permanently to Delhi, where she was studying architecture. After a brief marriage to a fellow student, she embarked on a long relationship with a filmmaker, which ignited her career as a writer: screenplays, essays, and at last the novel she titled The God of Small Things. The book became a sensation, earning her money and fame, as well as notoriety: She faced charges of “obscenity and corrupting public morality.” Arundhati sets her life in the context of India’s roiling politics, of which she became an outspoken critic. For many years, she writes, “I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I traveled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-warrior.” Throughout, Mrs. Roy loomed large in her daughter’s life, and her death, in 2022, left the author overcome with grief. “I had grown into the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her.” Without her, “I didn’t make sense to myself anymore.” Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love.
An intimate, stirring chronicle.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668094716
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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