Pagans, spiritualists, and other open-minded thinkers will relish this memoir.
A Wiccan practitioner shares 40 years of magic in this memoir.
In a series of vignettes about her experiences and development as a self-described shamanic witch, Fallingstar (White as Bone, Red as Blood: The Storm God, 2011, etc.) draws on themes of spirituality, history, psychology, and also addresses social and political issues. Early chapters tell the story of the author as a young girl, when she says she started to get hints that there was magic in the world and that it was an integral part of her own soul. Readers meet her family, friends, and kindred spirits she met over the years—an eclectic band of companions—as she recounts their shared experiences. Some chapters take a rollicking trip through the 1970s hippie subculture, in which she was an enthusiastic participant; in them, she writes of acid trips (in one, a giant baby gorilla battles with a god that’s “entirely composed of seething, flickering blue fire”) and free love (her ethical code was to “never to sleep with a married man unless I was also sleeping with his wife”). The chapters fly by, as most are only three or four pages long, and Fallingstar’s wry, witty observations are amusing; for example, she likens one Wiccan principle to the no-refund policy at her favorite Chinese restaurant (“When we don’t like what we have ordered from life’s menu, we can’t just send it back”). Readers will find it fun to skip around, which is easy to do, as the author’s story isn’t strictly chronological; the first half is broadly about her childhood and the latter, her development into a Wiccan practitioner. Skeptics will find some portions difficult to accept, such as her accounts of past-life memories of being burned as a witch. However, the book effectively dispels notions that witches are generally motivated by evil, and the author expresses her love of nature, noting that she “always prefer[s] to look for logic, to assume the supernatural is actually just super natural—something in nature we just don’t understand yet.” Her closing words aptly quote the 1970 film Little Big Man: “Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t.”
Pagans, spiritualists, and other open-minded thinkers will relish this memoir.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-699-2
Page Count: 280
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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