A debut book mixes an autobiographical account with a paranormal investigation of a property in rural Virginia.
The story begins with Miller’s decision to buy a house in a part of Virginia known as Clover Hollow. He was returning from a trip to the Coral Sea when he made the purchase sight unseen. Upon his arrival in Virginia, he was pleased with the risk he had taken, explaining how he discovered it was “a beautiful country house with a wrap around covered porch.” More than mere beauty, the house had a profound effect on him, giving him the feeling that “Earth’s natural energy” was emanating from the area. Moreover, the author soon learned that the house had once been owned by his forbears, and an old Native American trail cut across his property. Add into the equation odd-looking rocks and “bizarre supernatural activity,” and the question became what, if anything, did it all mean? As Miller believes that “there are no coincidences, everything happens for a reason, and everything is connected,” he proceeds to make his point with a combination of American history, views on extraterrestrials and ancient cultures, and stories of his personal experiences. The resulting stew provides a lot for the reader to savor. While accounts of Colonial Americans can be dry (“John Miller Sr, brother of Barbara Miller and uncle and friend of Jacob Mann Jr, also crossed over the mountains and settled on Indian Creek around 1775”), the many details of the author’s life add up to a strangely intimate portrait. From his childhood spent exploring caves to his earning money as an Uber driver, the work shows readers a man who seeks to understand the strangeness of his own past and property. Although evocations of figures like the Japanese author Masaru Emoto may fall flat with skeptics, the book illuminates the journey of one man dating back to the arrival of his ancestors in the New World. While Miller admits his ultimate conclusions are “very controversial,” they make for an imaginative attempt to explain the unexplainable.
A multifaceted encounter with historical, spiritual, and personal worlds.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9907777-1-7
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Blue Heron
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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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
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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