A touchingly honest account of an average person’s otherworldly experiences.
An autobiographical look at one woman’s dive into the paranormal.
Debut author Foster never gave much thought to psychics until she saw Sylvia Browne (Psychic Healing, 2009, etc.) on daytime television. This led her to contact a local clairvoyant for a reading. It was through this reading that the author was informed she had the ability to channel energy and, with practice, she could develop her own psychic abilities. She was also told that she had a spirit guide named Karl. Karl later informed her, “You can do anything even if you don’t think so.” So began a journey into an esoteric world of spirits, divinations, and finding one’s purpose in life. As inviting as it was at first, the journey eventually turned into a harrowing one. The author put great time and effort into developing her abilities, with often disappointing results. In time she would come to understand that perhaps Karl wasn’t the helpful spirit guide she had originally believed he was. Then there were periods of distress and even hospitalization. All the while she would find some solace in her supportive but skeptical husband, Rex. But was she really meant to be a psychic after all, or was the whole experience one great, frightening misstep? Foster searches for answers in simple prose that, though low on description, is always clear. Whether or not one believes in a spiritual realm and those who can contact it, it is easy to empathize with the moments when the author was “scared and felt completely isolated.” That kind of honesty makes the parts that involve paranormal material particularly revealing. The author describes a world where, for instance, the idea of someone conducting a “spirit clearing” over the phone is hardly unheard of. At times, though, the book delves into more mundane subject matter. A wedding anniversary she celebrated with her husband in Hawaii was uneventful: “We were able to make happy memories I’ll always cherish.” Although such material helps to ground the more fantastical episodes, it does not always amount to electrifying copy. Nevertheless, the author’s earnestness shines through. She has a personal story to tell, and, as tormenting and even embarrassing as it can be, she aims to tell it.
A touchingly honest account of an average person’s otherworldly experiences.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982224-99-8
Page Count: 270
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2021
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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