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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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