A sincere and compassionate work whose themes are sometimes overshadowed by flamboyant presentation.
A memoir of divine love that reads like a heady dream.
Debut author Navone writes that she’s had numerous visions and mystical experiences over the course of her life, but none surpass her extraordinary encounter with spiritual beings—“a group of Enlightened Masters from the Brotherhood of Light”—who, she says, gave her the means to write this book through the power of channeling. This “Divine Intervention” transformed her worldview, she notes, and had an overall positive impact on her life. Early on, she calls the tendency to live one’s life according to the whims of one’s ego “the Waiting Room.” She says that a person can live in a beautiful place, surrounded by luxuries, as she was, and still be in the Waiting Room if one has a “closed heart.” But a deep, powerful yearning for something greater, she asserts, can be the seed that grows into a divine revelation, allowing one to cast off fear and insecurity. The author traces her own metamorphosis from her first spiritual encounters to the channeling of this book. Readers follow her as she travels to many different places, including India and Brazil, on a quest to find sacred portals where she could receive divine messages. Eventually she found herself in Egypt, gazing in awe at the ancient pyramids, and there, she says, she worked feverishly on the book for long periods with little rest. Throughout this work, Navone writes passionately, her words filled with emotion: “Beloved reader, it is time to wake up and feel the immense power that already resides in each one of us.” Her descriptions of her time in Egypt, in particular, are rich with symbolism and heavy with meaning. As a result, it may take some effort on the part of the reader to cut through the flowery language (“I came to realize that Light is pure consciousness, that Love is what unifies all parts of us into Oneness; the universal glue that both binds us and dissolves all feelings of separation”) in order to understand the simple message within.
A sincere and compassionate work whose themes are sometimes overshadowed by flamboyant presentation.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-939116-37-6
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Waterside Productions
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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