A touch morbid and obsessive, and in the end, probably not all that helpful to those struggling with grief.
An angst-ridden search for the afterlife.
Having lost both her parents and a close friend by her mid-20s, Smith (The Rules of Inheritance, 2012) has spent the rest of her life grappling with issues of grief and loss. This extends even to her profession as a therapist specializing in grief. In her second memoir, the author tracks her almost compulsive search for an understanding of what happens when people die and “where” the dead reside. In an often absorbing yet also self-absorbed narrative, Smith looks back on meetings with mediums, an astrologist and a past-life regression therapist. In addition, she recounts experiences with shamanism, meditation and séances. The most fascinating sections of the narrative chronicle her many encounters with mediums, as Smith seems to find a connection to lost relatives and yet cannot get past her pervasive skepticism. Oddly enough, in attempting to handle her grief, the author largely discounts out of hand any traditional religious avenue (though she did meet with a rabbi), preferring instead to stick firmly to the New-Age road. Death even permeates Smith’s relationships with her daughters, as she worries about the (albeit unlikely) possibility of leaving them alone and motherless at an early age. Each chapter ends with a letter written to her daughters for them to read once she is gone. In the end, Smith’s consolation comes in a realization that we are all part of a greater universe and that our physical deaths are more a change than an end or a beginning. In the meantime, we can only “do the best we can until we get to the other side, whatever that looks like.”
A touch morbid and obsessive, and in the end, probably not all that helpful to those struggling with grief.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59463-306-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hudson Street/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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