A casual account of intensely painful ceremonial rituals that provide pathways to the spiritual world of the Shoshoni and Lakota peoples. The usual picture of religious self-flagellation pales compared with what Twofeathers, a Native spiritual leader and craftsman, undergoes to achieve a higher understanding. Writing in a relaxed conversational prose, Twofeathers describes how, at urgings from the spirit world, he began to immerse himself in the yearly Sundance rituals held throughout the West. At first, his participation in the Shoshoni ritual merely required him to dance nearly continuously under a hot sun for four days, whthout food or water. Graduating to the Lakota ceremony, Twofeathers has his chest pierced with bones to which ropes are affixed, tying Twofeathers to a sacred tree; running backwards at full speed is the painful means of seaparating from the tree. But there's more. Twofeathers also has his back piereced to enable him to drag up to eight buffalo skulls four times around a sacred arbor. As a veteran of these practices, Twofeathers comes to regard himself as a healer (to the amazement of doctors, he dissolves his agonizing gallstones and somewhat alleviates his high blood pressure and diabetic problems through spiritual medicine), a seer, and a counselor, whose services are sought after within the Native American community. Paralleling his account of these rites is the tale of his success as a craftsman of ``medicine wheels'' and ``dream catchers,'' which are eagerly snapped up at craft fairs and New Age gatherings, and the saga of his unhappy family life, which is finally stabilized, thanks in large part to his flesh sacrifices. A modest and likeable narrator, Twofeathers avoids the self- righteous polemics sometimes found in this genre, and while the gorier sections are initially jolting, his aplomb in withstanding pain and coming back for more lends a certain normalcy to this ritual.
Pub Date: July 25, 1996
ISBN: 0-7868-6215-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
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 2026 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.
