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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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