An engaging account of signs and wonders enriching an ordinary life.
A woman’s autobiographical account focuses on the portents that have filled her life.
Fletcher’s slim nonfiction debut recounts major events and landmarks in her life: her childhood, her marriage, her two sons, her longtime relationships with her parents, and her writing career. She finds in this narrative an array of “signs” sent to her from the cosmos. Her book breaks these incidents into short, discrete segments, many of them accompanied by her own photographs. She writes with affecting clarity about her marriage to a rock-solid husband who could be gruff but was always supportive; her changing relationship with her father as his health steadily declined; standout moments with her strong-willed sons; and the ups and downs of life in general. The pattern of the chapters is intentionally repeated: Some trial or difficult problem will present itself to the author; she will reach a point where she sees no hope of an answer; and then some unexpected twist or “sign” will happen and a resolution will suddenly appear. For 30 years, for instance, Fletcher consistently lost rings—from high school or from other special occasions—despite having a jewelry box with a special compartment for ring storage. Eventually, she realized that the compartment was defective: The missing rings had all fallen inside the box. Another time, she dreamed of owning a lakeside cabin resembling the one in an old painting she’d loved and then one day unexpectedly found just such a property for sale in her price range, accompanied by a series of “signs” that indicated to her that her parents had guided the whole search. The book is a connected chain of such events. Fletcher’s writing is smooth and invitingly readable; even in brief, her character sketches, particularly of her father, are evocative. Her work, which describes an earthly life that’s bounded on all sides by unearthly help and guidance, will have an immediate appeal to like-minded readers of all religions (the author is Christian, but there’s hardly any specifically Christian emphasis in the text). But more skeptical readers will find reasonable doubt in these pages. “Over the past few years, signs, synchronicities, bizarre happenings, or divine interventions, however you name them, have become powerful in my life,” Fletcher writes. The events described are wide-ranging: An editor accepts a freelance piece; an unexpected job loss opens up the free time for the author to pursue a writing career; a heart-shaped hole in a potato chip brings reassurance during a stressful period of being an in-home caregiver for her ailing father; a heart-shaped patch of snow on a roof helps her grieve for her father; and the sight of two doves being affectionate to each other convinces her that her parents were reunited in the afterlife. These and all the other incidents covered here will strike some readers as fairly ordinary coincidences. For those readers, investing them with otherworldly significance produces a case of pareidolia, the common phenomenon of seeing patterns or something supernatural in what is actually simple coincidence mixed with wishful thinking. Still, Fletcher delivers an engrossing story filled with vivid details.
An engaging account of signs and wonders enriching an ordinary life.Pub Date: July 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5043-3627-7
Page Count: 110
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
A moving, heartfelt account of a hospice veteran.
Lessons about life from those preparing to die.
A longtime hospice chaplain, Egan (Fumbling: A Pilgrimage Tale of Love, Grief, and Spiritual Renewal on the Camino de Santiago, 2004) shares what she has learned through the stories of those nearing death. She notices that for every life, there are shared stories of heartbreak, pain, guilt, fear, and regret. “Every one of us will go through things that destroy our inner compass and pull meaning out from under us,” she writes. “Everyone who does not die young will go through some sort of spiritual crisis.” The author is also straightforward in noting that through her experiences with the brokenness of others, and in trying to assist in that brokenness, she has found healing for herself. Several years ago, during a C-section, Egan suffered a bad reaction to the anesthesia, leading to months of psychotic disorders and years of recovery. The experience left her with tremendous emotional pain and latent feelings of shame, regret, and anger. However, with each patient she helped, the author found herself better understanding her own past. Despite her role as a chaplain, Egan notes that she rarely discussed God or religious subjects with her patients. Mainly, when people could talk at all, they discussed their families, “because that is how we talk about God. That is how we talk about the meaning of our lives.” It is through families, Egan began to realize, that “we find meaning, and this is where our purpose becomes clear.” The author’s anecdotes are often thought-provoking combinations of sublime humor and tragic pathos. She is not afraid to point out times where she made mistakes, even downright failures, in the course of her work. However, the nature of her work means “living in the gray,” where right and wrong answers are often hard to identify.
A moving, heartfelt account of a hospice veteran.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-481-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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