A sassy, colorful take on New-Age insights.
A self-help memoir about one woman overcoming a broken marriage and alcoholism to find spiritual fulfillment.
“Magical chapters can start with really sucky endings,” writes Muldoon (Giant Love Song, 2018, etc.), and she begins this remembrance with one such conclusion. Her marriage to fellow actor “Reed” (names have been changed) collapsed in divorce after she learned that he’d been having an affair with a former Miss Universe. Suddenly, the author was facing life as a single mother of a 3-year-old, so to make ends meet, she became a children’s party entertainer and auditioned for acting jobs in commercials and theater productions. As she did so, she took a year off from pursuing romantic relationships to focus on her own emotional healing. Her period of celibacy, she says, forced her to rely on herself, but she eventually met “Will,” a fellow actor and a cancer survivor. Although they’d assumed that he was sterile from chemotherapy, she became pregnant before they married and went on to have two more children. Muldoon finally confronted her drinking problem—which began in her teen years, after her mother’s death—by attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and reading Helen Schucman’s 1976 book A Course in Miracles. Now she considers herself a spiritual coach and “celebrant,” and she directs the SpeakEasy Spiritual Community. Later, when she got a call from the aforementioned Miss Universe, lamenting that Reed was seeing someone else, she responded with compassion, rather than vengeful glee. Muldoon re-creates her story with vivid descriptions, believable dialogue, and enjoyable portraits of such people as her occasional roommate “Skye.” Along the way, she offers keen observations on the “scripts and structures” that underpin the modern dating game, which subordinate women’s needs to men’s senses of entitlement. The timeline can be a bit confusing when the memoir loops back to past events, but the book’s arrangement is more thematic than chronological; the 16 chapter titles align with a final list of exhortations. The author also offers concrete, valuable examples of how the “feminine Divine” can help turn trauma into spiritual wisdom, which should particularly appeal to fans of Louise Hay’s work.
A sassy, colorful take on New-Age insights.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-447-9
Page Count: 232
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2018
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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