A travel narrative and childrearing memoir that will appeal to those interested in shamanistic healing and other aspects of...
An account of the author’s struggles to cope with her young daughter’s troublesome imaginary friend.
Edelman (Motherless Mothers: How Losing a Mother Shapes the Parent You Become, 2007, etc.) chronicles a period in 2000 when her three-year-old daughter Maya invented an imaginary friend named Dodo. At first the author consulted parenting books, friends and the family pediatrician in Southern California. However, as Maya’s aggressive behavior worsened and she started to talk about being under the control of Dodo, her parents feared the onset of an inherited mental illness, or even a spirit possession. The main drama of the story is centered on the family vacation to Belize, during which they toured Mayan ruins, investigated local culture and ancient healing traditions, and, with different degrees of comfort and faith, took their daughter to local shaman healers in search of a cure. Edelman became convinced that Maya’s problem was more than a normal developmental phase and was soon persuaded that alternative healing was having a positive effect, leading to a final ritual cure involving a bath of flowers and prayers. This immediately and miraculously led to the Maya’s renouncement of her imaginary friend and to the author’s growing belief in the efficacy of alternative-healing practices. Though Edelman is an accomplished, mostly insightful writer, the narrative is overly dependent on descriptions of her child’s increasingly dramatic temper tantrums.
A travel narrative and childrearing memoir that will appeal to those interested in shamanistic healing and other aspects of New Age spirituality.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-345-50650-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
