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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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