An often touching story that occasionally gets bogged down in philosophical precepts.
A spiritual teacher helps a dying student navigate a battle with cancer in this debut memoir.
Bischoff had her first spiritual vision when she was only 5 years old, she says, when she was “awakened in the middle of the night by a brilliant white light.” She was alarmed yet strangely reassured at the same time, and she shared the experience with only one other person: her grandmother, who said that she’d also had mystical visitations. Because of this warm and loving relationship, Bischoff writes, she was able to come to terms with her own unsettling gift, responding to calls for help that she saw in the auras of people around her by transmitting love and empathy. Years later, after she launched a successful career as a self-described “life coach and energy-healing practitioner,” the author met Lily,a 33-year-old woman in remission after a second diagnosis of breast cancer. (Bischoff notes that the names of some people in her book have been changed.) Lily joined the author’s “Leading From the Heart Group” to try to find a spiritual path through her illness, and she gave and received support from like-minded seekers. Lily’s bond with the group gave her strength, Bischoff says, when, nine years later, her cancer returned. Once again, she turned to the author, her teacher and friend, to help her with her final journey. Bischoff’s layered memoir alternates her own story with Lily’s ongoing struggles, including biographical facts interspersed with spiritual ideas culled from Eastern religions and New Age traditions. The transitions, which include a description of one of the author’s teaching trips to Japan in the days before Lily’s decline, add vitality and interest to more expository text about Bischoff’s belief system. Lily’s story is compelling as she finds her way through fear and illness toward acceptance, and she sometimes offers powerful personal insights: “The cancer, Cynthia, has been a terrible bully.” The descriptions of the author’s spiritual philosophy can be wearing at times, but overall, the book provides readers with a moving depiction of the end of life.
An often touching story that occasionally gets bogged down in philosophical precepts.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-8146-0
Page Count: 184
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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