A mostly credulous look at the famous Israeli who claims to be able to bend spoons with his mind. Margolis (Cleese Enconters, 1992) first met and befriended Uri Geller in 1996. Margolis decided that he would do a biography of the mentalist, with his cooperation but examining all viewpoints. The result reads somthing like an E! Television documentary: friends and schoolmates (including “where are they now” information) recollect Geller’s childhood. These accounts are presented to refute the claim by his opponents that Geller created his show in his early 20s. The picture these accounts paint is that of a colorful and turbulent childhood, spent first in Tel Aviv, then Cyprus, and back to Israel for military service. It is in Tel Aviv as a child that Geller reports his first experience with the unknown. This takes the form of an encounter with “a ball of light” in a city garden. A short time after this, the spoons start bending. Geller’s family moves to Cyprus when he is 11; there he is remembered for playing mischief by moving the hands of the clocks in the classrooms and always being able to make the difficult shots in basketball. This, Geller contends, is due to his psychokinetic abilities. During his military service, machine gun parts are mysteriously transported from one location to another (and back again), ostensibly via the same method. The author also credits Geller with numerous happenings during the writing of the book, including clocks that fall off the wall in strange ways, laptops that stop working, and, of course, distorted cutlery. There are even parties where anyone can learn how to bend spoons with their mind, with a little help from their hands. An obviously wowed author presents a mostly sympathetic view of the life and times of Uri Geller. (16 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-56649-025-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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