An engaging story of an intercontinental spiritual journey.
In this debut memoir, a woman embraces a lifestyle she never imagined for herself and discovers the power of vulnerability and faith.
When Hill lost her beloved husband, Paul, to illness six months after their wedding day, her life came to a standstill. As an accomplished academic, her life didn’t lose all purpose, but her lack of faith and connection to God left her feeling like she had no way to move forward from the heartbreaking loss. As time passed after the funeral, she found herself unable to cope. She underwent a series of failed attempts to find answers; she visited a psychic reader, then went through periods of isolation and depression, finally ending up on a therapist’s couch. She eventually decided to take six months’ leave from work, and after receiving an invitation from her cousin, she embarked on a journey to Scotland, to a spiritual community called the Findhorn Foundation. Hill found that members of the community were all doing intense self-discovery work. Although she was apprehensive, she explored the community’s offerings, from body therapy to group sharing sessions to “Angel Meditation.” Hill eventually opened up to a group about her apprehensions and fears of intimacy and made an emotional connection. Soon she was able to return home and began to find closure regarding Paul’s death. But burying her husband’s ashes brought on a whole new wave of grief and pain, and Hill returned to the Findhorn Foundation the following summer. This time, she opened herself up to the foundation’s teachings and placed her trust in the community members and leaders. Through this process, Hill discovered a new relationship with God and human connection through song, dance and movement. She faced an important question: Could she live a new life of emotional honesty outside the Findhorn Foundation, without the support of the community’s leaders? The author weaves humor into her narrative, juxtaposing her grief with the sometimes-quirky personalities and events at the Findhorn Foundation. Each of the book’s chapters is tightly written, taking the reader on a rewarding journey through her healing process. Overall, Hill delivers a moving memoir of her transformation from skepticism to spirituality and from grief to joyful living.
An engaging story of an intercontinental spiritual journey.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0986612756
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Incite Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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.
