Another here-come-the-aliens book that one might be willing to dismiss as mindless entertainment if it weren't so determined to pretend it's serious. Craft (Omega Institute of Holistic Studies) has cast his nets wide and pulled them back full—and he has thrown nothing away. Abductees, medieval elves, crop circles, ghosts, ley lines, Bigfoot sightings, secret government warehouses full of alien bodies: All serve equally as material for his wide-eyed speculation that something out there is trying to get in touch with us. Even folklore, horror fiction, and sci-fi movies are thrown into the hopper on the theory that, if the aliens were adopting a strategy of preparing our minds for their arrival, they'd use this kind of material. For good measure, the author throws in a few of his own occult encounters—a ``ghost dog'' spotted in a haunted house, a weird feeling while practicing tai chi on a Mayan pyramid. The argument rarely stays focused for more than a couple of paragraphs, and it plays fast and loose with science and logic. The author appears to have forgotten the relative distances of Uranus and Neptune, and he dates the dinosaur extinctions at ``hundreds of millions of years ago'' (although he is evidently not sure the giant creatures really are extinct). And he blithely skims over the fact that some of his themes (e.g., von Daniken's ``ancient astronauts'') have been thoroughly debunked. Only a few speculations, such as the ``Montauk Project'' (alleged time-travel experiments by the US Air Force with Nazi assistance), seem too flaky for him to swallow whole. While there is plenty here to give a susceptible late-night reader a good case of the chills, there is little for the intellect to grapple with.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14438-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
There are many lessons to be learned in these pages–not least of them, to keep your eyes open for oncoming teenagers.
"I'm a number on their ledger," writes O'Malley, in this thoughtful memoir of consumer David versus insurer Goliath. "And they're dedicated to a new medical oath: This above all, do no harm to our financials."
O'Malley suffered major spinal trauma when a sleeping 17-year-old driver rammed her car one August afternoon. Unable to work, and at both physical and emotional distance from her young adult son, she finds herself in the early pages of her memoir to be a kind of surrogate aunt to a young immigrant girl and a surrogate child to an aunt of her own; her portraits of these characters, and indeed of most of the figures in the narrative, are marked by affection, warmth and knowing humor. But the tale takes on a dark cast as O'Malley soon stands accused of being a malingerer and denied long-term disability pay while enduring more and more physical distress in the wake of her accident. In quest of relief, she tries the expected route–namely, scheduling appointments at her HMO and undergoing tests to discover why her pain should persist months after the accident. What follows is a Kafkaesque sequence of misunderstandings and evasions, as, by her account, one specialist after another administers the wrong test, takes the wrong X-ray and eventually cuts into the wrong section of her spine. In the subsequent chapters, she becomes something of an authority on her pain, providing at least some rebuttal to arrogant doctors who, one by one, ask what fine medical school she attended to allow her any opinion in the matter of her own health. O'Malley's unhappy tale ends well enough, thanks to the help of a doctor on the opposite end of the country from the angry neurologist who becomes her bête noire. Readers may be a tad frustrated, though, to discover that the real ending is a settlement whose terms she cannot discuss, inasmuch as she has discussed everything else so candidly.
There are many lessons to be learned in these pages–not least of them, to keep your eyes open for oncoming teenagers.Pub Date: June 24, 2004
ISBN: 1-4134-5487-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A collection that will surely interest readers already devoted to Virginia City lore, but that may not grab a general...
An amalgamation of ghost stories set in the remote town where Mark Twain honed his skills 140 years ago.
During a trip to Virginia City in 1999, Bruns and a friend approached a building with the intent of exploring it. As they entered, however, she stopped abruptly–this place seems haunted, she said. Bruns had always found supernatural phenomena such as ghosts fascinating, but had never known quite what to make of claims that otherworldly beings exist. This experience, though, intrigued and annoyed him simultaneously. How could she sense ghosts when he couldn't? He decided to investigate further by interviewing certain people in Virginia City. Tales were "hurled" at Bruns, "unsolicited at the very mention" that he was collecting ghost stories. As a result, many of the stories name actual people and, "at least in their minds, actual events." Inundated with varying versions and copious detail, Bruns decided he would "combine different stories from different people into a single narrative, just to capture all the many ways in which spirits choose to manifest themselves." This was a dubious decision, as many of the stories are simply not compelling as fiction and track poorly as nonfiction. The word "true" muddies the interpretation of the stories, as does his caveat that "Like Mark Twain, I see no reason why I should let the truth get in the way of a good story." After chronicling the hauntings of specific sites–the Silver Terrace Cemetery, the Old Funeral Parlor, a D Street Residence, the Gold Hill Hotel and the Pioneer Emporium, to name a few–Bruns provides briefly researched histories that work nicely. Four maps at the back of the book aid understanding of northern Nevada, Virginia City itself and two of the haunted locales.
A collection that will surely interest readers already devoted to Virginia City lore, but that may not grab a general audience.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-9745217-1-X
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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