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 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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
