Deep, thoughtful reflections on overcoming personal crisis.
A psychologist’s debut memoir explores the intersection of science and spirituality.
Born in 1947, Alne grew up in Gerritsen Beach, a bucolic section of Brooklyn, New York. His mother suffered from poor health and she turned to alcohol for relief from her pain—a self-destructive pattern that the author unfortunately emulated later as a teenager. Alne struggled with an addiction to drugs—particularly codeine cough syrup, barbiturates, and LSD—but finally kicked the habit and attended Brooklyn College at night. There, he discovered that he loved learning, and that he had a natural aptitude for it. He graduated magna cum laude with a degree in psychology in 1974 and eventually earned a doctorate. He found work as a school psychologist for the New York City Board of Education, but was hobbled—and emotionally scarred—by an unprovoked attack by a group of students in 1991. After a protracted struggle with herniated discs, he was hired to treat patients for the Brooklyn Workers Compensation Board. After he suffered a stroke, he scoured the latest literature on both science and spirituality to discover alternative sources of healing and guidance. Much of this book is devoted to cataloging these intellectual peregrinations; the author offers his views on contemporary physics, biology, and cosmology, which he says have created new portals into understanding the nature of the paranormal. Later chapters discuss the power of faith and prayer as agents of healing and assert that their efficacies are supported by science. This is an eclectic memoir that combines not only autobiographical remembrances, but also stand-alone essays on such subjects as health care and the limitations of a materialistic conception of man. The prose is lucid and anecdotal throughout (“Science is answering religious questions that we have been asking for thousands of years”), even when discussing the latest trends in quantum mechanics. However, the book as a whole is wide-ranging but fractured in its structure, as it tries to do too much in too few pages. That said, it’s a delightfully eccentric look at the potential comity between religion and science from someone who has respect for both.
Deep, thoughtful reflections on overcoming personal crisis.Pub Date: June 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5043-5788-3
Page Count: 194
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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