A rich, insightful New-Age narrative about the author’s holistic development.
In this debut account of losing a beloved family member, a woman finds hope and joy in profound moments of spiritual connection.
When Austill-Clausen lost her beloved brother to AIDS in 1995, she embarked on a journey of grief—one that she says eventually brought her to a form of enlightenment. Through her connection with nature and animals, she says, she began to discover her own connection to the spirit of her brother—and to those of others, as well. An encounter with a manatee and a spiritual epiphany while riding her horse led her to contact a spiritual teacher, Nancy Arael, who showed her the power of her chakras and meditation. In this touching narrative, Austill-Clausen intimately describes her progress toward spiritual awakening, as well as her experience of sharing it with other members of her family. In one vivid scene, she tells of a moment one morning in 1996, when she connected deeply with the rocks, ice, trees, and other elements of a secluded landscape: “I realized all stones were alive, and each had its own power. I thought about all the times I had casually picked up a rock and flung it away without asking its permission.” An occupational therapist by trade, she writes in clear, conversational prose that skips no details about her meditation experiences and visions. As a result, what begins as a sad story of grief develops into a story of a world of fairies, spirits, love, and light. Readers who are interested in chakra healing, meditation, shamanism, energy crystals, and spiritual development in general will enjoy the rich, journalistic quality of Austill-Clausen’s book, and perhaps even feel prompted to follow in her footsteps.
A rich, insightful New-Age narrative about the author’s holistic development.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-130-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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