by Klazina Dobbe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 2018
An often revealing book about a search for spiritual solace.
A woman diagnosed with breast cancer receives spiritual comfort and support from generations of female ancestors in this debut memoir.
In her introduction, Dobbe outlines the factors that helped her to face the most challenging period of her life with courage and determination. She did so, she says, by exploring “the gloomiest as well as the most glorious parts of my soul.” She asserts that her deep connection to numerous past and present female relatives helped to guide her on her journey. These included her sister, who received a diagnosis of cancer before Dobbe received her own; the spirit of her late mother, whose near-death experience during a World War II bombing in the Netherlands, she says, left her with psychic abilities; and her grandmother, whose spirit lovingly teaches the author, decades after her own death from breast cancer. Dobbe, an acupuncturist and tulip farmer, writes that she’s keenly attuned to both the mystical rhythms of nature and the possibilities of alternative methods of medical treatment. She says that she helped to ease her sister Coby’s suffering with plant-based remedies, such as curcuma and cat’s-claw, and that she finds her own comfort and spiritual guidance from meditating among trees. When family divisions surface after Coby’s death, Dobbe negotiates them by entering “the sacred circle” with the spirits of her sister and other “women of my tribe,” where she receives loving advice about mending damaged connections. The author’s tone is warm and enthusiastic throughout this work, and her journey through her family history is compellingly intimate; for example, she espouses the theory that one’s ancestors’ trauma gets embedded in one’s genetic code, so that in this remembrance, she’s exploring her own inherited pain. Some readers may need to suspend their disbelief, though, when she recounts her psychic experiences; the language of members of Dobbe’s aforementioned tribe, for example, sometimes sounds a bit like modern psychotherapists’, as when one explains the author’s grandmother’s pain as being “a compilation of mental and emotional experiences.” Overall, however, the narrative offers a tender portrait of human suffering.
An often revealing book about a search for spiritual solace.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5043-9835-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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
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