An eye-opening, consistently fascinating, and engrossing profile of the modern spiritualist movement.
A memoirist explores modern spiritualism through its centuries-old legacy and a hallowed summer camp.
Ptacin (Poor Your Soul, 2016) examines Maine’s Camp Etna, a summer colony established in 1876 dedicated to communal gatherings where spiritualists assemble for mental and physical mediumship and to engage in paranormal fellowship. The Maine-based author immersed herself in the community, and her reportage reflects equal amounts of diligent journalism and wide-eyed fascination. As Ptacin writes, spiritualists staunchly believe in the afterlife and that each human embodies the capacity and wields the tools to channel and communicate with a host of otherworldly entities. Her tour of the camp activities, which is both thrilling and unsettling, began with a startling “table tipping” session with a medium. In appropriately affable and accessible prose, the author describes what separates spiritualists from more common American religious traditions: They are “willing to offer and provide scientific evidence to prove what many people may otherwise believe to be a bunch of bullshit.” Running alongside her probing examination of Camp Etna is an astute history of the rise and fall of American spiritualism, which began in 1888 with Kate and Margaret Fox, who exhibited supernatural abilities. During her months at Camp Etna as initially “just a journalist eager to see a ghost,” Ptacin’s neophyte education on spiritualism and her interactions with its practicing population blossomed from spiked curiosity to rapt participation in ghost hunts and dowsing sessions. As the author notes, the spiritualists she met form an extraordinarily convictive community “grasping for meaning in humanity beyond the basic biological facts,” yet the enigmatic profiles—past and present—collectively display a much more dynamic tapestry. Ptacin also brings aspects of faith and individual ability into view, as when she probed the difficulty of uncovering one’s own spirit guide and an Etna spiritualist confidently spoke: “We all can do it.”
An eye-opening, consistently fascinating, and engrossing profile of the modern spiritualist movement.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-381-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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