A born-again believer makes a diverting adventure story out of embracing her sensitivity to benevolent spirits.
Berry’s intriguing debut memoir suggests that belief in the paranormal, including ghosts and psychic experiences, can be reconciled with orthodox Christianity.
Goldfield Hotel, Nevada: a haunted site if ever there was one. Berry can’t quite believe she has agreed to come here, through her public relations role, to serve as an impartial observer for a TV station's paranormal investigation. “A good Christian woman…wouldn’t have put herself here to dabble in the occult,” she chides herself. Yet Berry had long been receptive to supernatural experiences—whether church-sanctioned or not. Her strong Christian faith sustained her through 18 years suffering with chronic fatigue syndrome, the result of a virus contracted on an African safari. There had been many signs of her paranormal sensitivity: For instance, she felt the presence of dead relatives and conveyed her grandfather’s message that it was time for her grandmother to join him, and she remembered a “Circus Master” figure haunting their duplex when she was a child. Berry took advantage of working at Truckee Meadows Community College to attend a ghost-hunting conference and train with a psychic, though she worried all along that such experiences were at odds with faith in God. However, friends encouraged her to keep an open mind; perhaps her sensitivity would bring her closer to God. As Berry returns to the Goldfield, where her framing story began, she’s unsure whether her health and faith are strong enough to withstand a full-scale haunting. Over a long night filled with sensing dead residents’ emotions, smelling ghostly odors, capturing footsteps and voices via EVP (electronic voice phenomena) recording, and feeling a hand stroking her hair, Berry’s “fear of ghosts transforms to awe.” Hearing the voice of God, having a telepathic friend affirm her sightings at the hotel, and experiencing a miraculous healing from her CFS all confirm for her that her path is not dangerous and that it has divine approval. Present-tense narration and convincing dialogue make for a gripping account, and Berry successfully balances abstract thought with physical realities; even a scene as simple as peeling potatoes in her home allows for extended contemplation of spiritual happenings. Intriguing as it is, the memoir is so full of subjective experience that it is unlikely to convince doubters.
A born-again believer makes a diverting adventure story out of embracing her sensitivity to benevolent spirits.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-0989872201
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Kathleen Berry
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
