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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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