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
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
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