A captivating consideration of the life of a California mystic.
In a vivid biography written in the form of a memoir, the author tells the story of a California psychic born during the Great Depression.
In the introduction, Corazza describes her first meeting with Connie Castro Jackson and the firm friendship that evolved, culminating in their working together to outline Jackson’s history, which Corazza writes from Jackson’s point of view. Jackson’s mother, Josie Mills, was one of millions of impoverished people who fled Oklahoma during the 1930s, exchanging the despair of the Dust Bowl for the hard life of a migrant farm worker. Jackson was born in a worker camp; her father was Ciriaco “Cherry” Castro, a Filipino farmworker she described as “the sweetest man I have ever known.” From Cherry, she inherited her dark skin, which exposed her to racism. From Josie, she inherited a shame that “passed to me through the womb” and led Jackson to reject her father’s culture and language for years. She claims she also inherited a psychic ability from Cherry, which first manifested itself as the ability to see terrifying spirits. Jackson faced her fears and began to explore all facets of New Age and psychic beliefs; she overcame both institutionalized racism and social prejudice to become one of two students of color in a mostly White cosmetology school. She married, and while her spouse didn’t believe in psychic phenomena, he supported her in all her pursuits, including her spiritual studies and her eventual career as a spiritual teacher and leader of numerous classes and conferences. Corazza’s narrative provides a complex, personal view of the political, economic, and racial realities of Depression-era California farm workers and the rise of New Age spirituality—all told in a down-to-earth, unique voice. The author’s attempt to capture Jackson’s point of view is convincing and adds an immediacy that would likely be lost in a third-person description of events. At the end, a “Message From Connie,” channeled by Corazza during meditation sessions, adds a fitting “woo-woo” note to a fascinating story.
A captivating consideration of the life of a California mystic.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68513-050-3
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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