An intimate, healing conversation from beyond.
Findlen, a former social worker and now holistic life guide and “polarity therapist,” pens her first book, a spiritual journal on the relationship she developed with her deceased daughter.
When her daughter, Kori Sue, died in a Jeep accident, the author, seeking solace and torn with grief, began writing letters to Kori in her journal, exploring her pain, her rage, her anguish. Then, suddenly, Kori began to respond in letters of her own. Long the stock of mediums, Romantic poets, and mystics, automatic writing allows a writer like Findlen to overcome the seemingly unconquerable rift between the living and the dead and to explore and to heal through this writing process. Findlen’s book, the result of such an exploration, attempts to share with the living the wisdom and insight of the dead. “You should hear the Ommms here, Mom. They vibrate through everything,” Kori, the “co-author,” writes with her typical enthusiasm in describing this rather alternative afterlife in which Jesus and Buddha are buddies and the thoughts of the dead can instantly manifest. The informality of these letters and New Age after-death visions sometimes comes in a jarring contrast to the sententious wisdom Kori offers her mother. Kori takes flying lessons, then meets for playtime with some spirit children and studies with Druids. She continually counsels her mother to overcome her grief, not to lose faith, to meditate and gain spiritual balance. Eventually, after constant prodding from her daughter, Findlen begins to gain strength and start the long journey to overcome her grief and despair. Findlen and her daughter share the same casual New Age–inflected writing style, both often ending their exhortatory sentences with the exclamation “Ha!” Daughter advises her mom to anticipate the “Big Shift,” when everyone on Earth will magically undergo a mind change, but really the focus in this book is on Findlen’s transformation and her desire to turn her exploration into a book, an ambition fostered and encouraged by her daughter and her afterlife “team” of spirit supporters. Though sometimes repetitive, it’s an often engaging account of a spirit dialogue likely to appeal to spiritually inclined readers.
An intimate, healing conversation from beyond.Pub Date: June 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5043-3038-1
Page Count: 408
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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