A worthwhile autobiography for fans of Jim Cork or readers who are curious about spiritualism.
Jim Cork presents a quirky and humble autobiography in Communicating with the World Unseen, the story of his life as a spiritual medium.
Instead of starting the book at the age when he discovered his own psychic abilities, Cork begins with his birth. In the first three chapters he discusses his difficult childhood, from his severe health issues to adoption and separation from his older sisters. Cork only discusses his first spiritual awakening in Chapter 5, when he relates a story about feeling a presence in his room at fourteen years old [27]. Much of the book meanders like this, as Cork aims to tell the story of his life, not just of his career as a medium. The other details help to shape his character in the readers’ mind, and the simple, matter-of-fact style of the prose is somewhat charming (“My first love was medicine. I loved biology and nearly always came out on top in my class, even though my grades were down in other subject”) [35]. Cork was born in Grimsby, England, and by his late adolescence, had gained a reputation as a spiritual healer. He then discusses his foray into the Merchant Navy, his brief stint with a scaffolding firm, and his long-term job as a bus driver. Later in life, he joined the the East Lindsey Metaphysical Society, or ELMS [57]. From then on, in the latter half of the book, Cork engages more thoroughly with the material that is most likely to interest readers, his progress as a medium. He tells of practicing readings and transfiguration, of times when “Spirit” did not come to him while he was on the roster in front of a congregation, and of times when he was able to pass messages on to others. On top of these anecdotes, Cork shares advice and wisdom for other mediums or spiritual healers, as, for example, here: “A medium must remember personal responsibility. This means that he should think about what he’s saying and how he’s going to say it” [103].
A worthwhile autobiography for fans of Jim Cork or readers who are curious about spiritualism.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-1477284131
Page Count: 172
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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