An engaging vision of the enduring nature of the human soul.
Spiritual counselor Rippy’s book offers accounts of the afterlife and assert the presence of unseen miracles in our midst.
Much of this book is made up of transcripts of nine past-life regressions in which Rippy says he helped people explore aspects of their previous existences. For each, he includes historical and relationship context and information about the causes of death of his subjects’ past lives. Stories include the life of Liza, a nanny in early-20th-century Boston who died of an allergic reaction to penicillin—in the company of a man that she only ever knew as a ghost. In another account, Rippy tells of a young woman who experienced a past-life regression to an orphaned boy named Elliot, who lived in 1910 and whose twin brother, Peter, was reincarnated as the young woman’s father. In a particularly compelling story, he describes a female subject who recalls serving as Lt. Hertzof, a member of a Nazi battalion that captured Brussels in World War II. Killed when his tank blows up, Hertzof then experiences hell for 1,000 years before God forgives him. Most of the stories of past lives end tragically in suicide, murder, or alcoholism, but their accounts of the afterlife may bring solace to some readers. Intriguingly, Rippy’s work doesn’t offer one consistent view of heaven, instead showcasing different versions that include spirit guides and councils, farms, spiritual “hospitals,” and other ways in which souls prepare for rebirth. This compelling book not only tells of hypnotic regressions conducted by the author, it also provides informative asides outlining how he helped clients focus during unfamiliar or startling experiences. He also informatively describes the steps that he says he uses to catch potential fabrications. In addition, readers learn of his techniques for keeping subjects from becoming retraumatized by past-life events and how he uses protective prayers and imagery to bring comfort to those entering hypnotic states.
An engaging vision of the enduring nature of the human soul.Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-15064-1
Page Count: 422
Publisher: Vision Peak Resources LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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