A lament that at certain moments, for its intensity, can break your heart.
Picardie’s (Music Man, 1990) search for contact with her sister, who died from breast cancer in 1997, has both lightness and ache, the melancholy of being condemned to live on after the death of one so loved, yet a willingness to explore “what lies beyond the edge of the expected.”
“When someone dies, they do not always disappear out of your life. You have a relationship with them: a relationship that changes, that begins to accommodate their silence.” But maybe not so easily: For years, that silence in Picardie’s life tore her to pieces. So she started an investigation into mystical approaches that might let her communicate with her sister Ruth. Written in the form of a diary, in a polished voice capable of both intense poignancy and dry humor, she tells of chasing spirits with the College of Psychic Studies and the Society for Psychical Research, with sensitives consequential and mortifyingly inconsequential, with spirit channelers who “translate a vast textured multidimensional image into linear language,” ghosts living in computer spell-checking systems, electronic voice phenomena, even a training course in mediumship, where, in a trance class, “I close my eyes to try to find the white light but keep getting distracted by elderly John’s snoring.” It isn’t Picardie’s intent to poke holes in the paranormal’s art; she is genuinely hunting for her sister, and her psychic encounters are eye-opening, to say the least. But she certainly runs up against some strange characters, from thought-form removalists to Living Energy Universe proponents, all portrayed with deft strokes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, personal reflections of family members, living and dead, seem to yield the most powerful connections when she feels “sure that Ruth’s spirit is there . . . our hearts combine, briefly, fiercely, soundlessly,” and she can hear Ruth whisper, “You are me.”
A lament that at certain moments, for its intensity, can break your heart.Pub Date: June 10, 2002
ISBN: 1-57322-211-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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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