An encouraging playbook for would-be demon-slayers.
A handbook for personal empowerment that concentrates on life’s demons and how to fight them.
The latest in Dunblazier’s (The Demon Slayer’s Handbook, 2015) series continues to offer personal anecdotes about her struggles as a psychic and spiritualist, as well as an account of the demons that she believes inhabit the mortal world. “There is a connection between people and demons,” she assures readers, and she structures her latest handbook around five parables (“the stories of the spirit guides that have worked with me in this lifetime and for some over many lifetimes”) and five “basic levels of perception”: physical, etheric, emotional, mental, and causal. Dunblazier focuses on encouraging her readers to remain vigilant in the face of the world’s evils, and to marshal the resources that are at their disposal, which include calm introspection, self-possession, and even good humor: “One of the things I know is that when you’re facing the devil head-on, or running for your life, fear is your friend—but not completely,” she writes in one of the book’s many pleasing, counterintuitive moves. “Your fear will eventually turn on you.” The author returns periodically to her own history with her spirit guides, but the main thrust of her book is a set of upbeat propositions about living in the moment and mastering one’s unruly inner world. These are aimed squarely at fellow spiritualists but are also applicable to a wider audience that’s prepared to see demons as metaphors. “Demons are energy, and energy doesn’t go away,” she warns readers, “it changes form”—hence, her emphasis on being alert and ready for anything. Using a potent combination of mystical concepts, including chakras and past lives, Dunblazier creates a guidebook that assures readers that they have the tools to defeat their own demons. The overall ideological framework can feel jumbled at times, but the central message of empowerment will appeal to spiritual seekers.
An encouraging playbook for would-be demon-slayers.Pub Date: May 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9963907-4-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: GoTracee Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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