An inspirational guide to using a soul’s long history to combat present-day negative forces.
A shaman’s handbook focuses on overcoming the demons of daily life.
Dunblazier (Master Your Inner World, 2016, etc.), a self-described empath, reincarnated soul, and spiritual healer, here continues her Demon Slayer series. She looks at the possible complications individuals might experience as a result of their own past lives, and the strategies people afflicted with a variety of “demons” can use to find inner strengths they didn’t know they possessed. The author styles herself as a demon slayer, a spiritual warrior with survival skills honed over many lifetimes. In her latest book, the long sections on her own life are the most intriguing parts. She recounts, for instance, squatting in a third-floor walk-up in a derelict 1980s Harlem apartment building, and she relates her personal interactions and pregnancy. Through her own and other personal stories, she’s able to bring to life her underlying “demon slayer” philosophies: the strategies “for balancing life’s traumas” and daring to have “the audacity to laugh and see the world through someone else’s eyes.” The author prefaces her book with a disclaimer that it presents no legally constituted medical advice, and her approaches range over a wide variety of New-Age or “alternative” medicine concepts such as massage therapy, acupuncture, Kundalini energy points, and herbal supplements. The drift of the engrossing volume returns often to the idea of past lives and their effect on the present and—this account being about reincarnation—the future: “The state a person is in when they die is the state they remain in after death,” she writes. “And it is the lower vibrational states of being—like anguish, fear, anger, grief, bitterness, or hate—that keep a spirit earthbound.” In this and all cases, Dunblazier acts effectively as the reader’s coach, foremost cheerleader, and guardian angel, and this has a cumulative effect that’s genuinely encouraging. The overarching message of empowerment should speak to people struggling with their own personal demons.
An inspirational guide to using a soul’s long history to combat present-day negative forces.Pub Date: April 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9963907-2-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: GoTracee Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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