A haunting and ultimately exasperating memoir leaving more unanswered questions than resolutions.
A widow contemplates the supernatural world after an unexplained series of occurrences.
In 2005, on the one-year anniversary of her agnostic husband Max’s death from esophageal cancer, retired newspaper publisher Durham discovered a “soft, white, powdery substance” on her bathroom mirror in the form of a handprint. Though mystified, as the daughter of a hypercritical mother and a Presbyterian minister who taught her the value of modesty and character, the author dismissed it, claiming that “entering the unknown was intimidating.” Previous unexplained and less-reliable incidents included a clock stopped on the exact time of Max’s death, flickering lights, pulsing walls, knocks on doors and ethereal “silky golden threads sailing horizontally in front of my face,” yet still Durham (together with son, Tanner) retained a natural skepticism until she saw the handprint—which she removed. Attempting to both comprehend her grief and adapt a fresh spiritual perspective, the author writes casually of entertaining New-Age literature and a holistic, energy-healing conduit. Upon subsequent anniversaries of Max’s death, “powdery images” and more handprints appeared on the same mirror (which she again removed), but Durham attempted to move forward in addition to dating a new beau, retiring and relocating from California to central Idaho. None of that mattered, however, once she discovered the rug she’d brought with her from Sacramento had begun to shift on its own and footprints appeared on the living room furniture. Her varied attempts to solve these personal mysteries brought her face to face with parapsychologists discussing multitiered consciousness and a phantom expert who believed the “conscious spirit” of Max might be responsible. Though ably chronicled, skeptical readers will remain frustrated at Durham’s lack of credible scientific follow-through into the mirror images, despite the book’s centerpiece of photographic evidence.
A haunting and ultimately exasperating memoir leaving more unanswered questions than resolutions.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-3130-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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