The author never delivers the promised entertainment wallop.
A Scottish psychic is charged under Britain’s Witchcraft Act of 1735 as the Allies prepare to launch the D-day invasion.
Psychologist and family therapist Shandler (Ophelia’s Mom, not reviewed) recounts this unlikeliest of tales in brittle, colorless prose that diffuses much of its drama. Nell Duncan, an overweight mother of six whose two sons were off fighting Hitler while she was on trial, never really comes into focus as anything more than a pathetic oddity. Nor is the book’s readability helped by the author’s habit of skipping abruptly back and forth from Duncan’s days as a young tomboy romping through Edinburgh to her adult years as a controversial medium continually hounded by skeptical psychiatrists and authorities. Duncan’s psychic powers surfaced early but didn’t provide escape from a generally sad life. She was thrown out by her mother after bearing a child out of wedlock and lost an infant daughter. Saddled with a feckless husband and growing family, she resorted to performing in public. Séances and spiritualism were wildly popular in war-torn Britain as grieving relatives tried to contact the soldiers dying daily on the battlefield. Duncan had a history of revealing secret ship movements while in a trance, so when she began giving séances in the harbor town of Portsmouth on Jan. 14, 1944, local authorities feared she would divulge the pending D-day invasion, slated to be launched from a nearby port. Much of the story revolves around her nine-day trial. Duncan’s attorney called no fewer than 39 defense witnesses, each of whom testified that she produced the talking ghosts of their departed loved ones through a spirit guide named Albert. Shandler never addresses the credibility of these accounts (didn’t anyone ever think to bring a camera?), and we can’t help but feel that the whole truth eludes us.
The author never delivers the promised entertainment wallop.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2006
ISBN: 0-306-81438-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
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
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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