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
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.
