An unsettling, absorbing account of the phenomenon of demonic possession by a medical expert.
A professor of clinical psychology at New York Medical College chronicles his decades of experience with people who believe they are demonically possessed.
In his foreword, Joseph English, past president of the American Psychiatric Association, writes that this book “may be unique in history: the serious treatment of a long-disputed topic by a superbly credentialed academic physician.” Gallagher was drawn into the world of demons by a priest who asked him to help rule out medical causes for a woman who said she was being beaten by invisible spirits. He’s been working in this field, mostly as an unpaid consultant to Catholic priests, ever since. Gallagher provides helpful context and background, including the history of belief in demons and the role of the Catholic Church in their exorcism, and he explains signs of the presence of demons: superhuman strength, speaking in foreign or archaic languages, abusive attacks, unexplained knowledge of the exorcist’s personal life. The author defines a continuum between demonic possession and oppression (possession is more serious) and describes the suffering of the possessed. He speculates on how victims came to be pursued by demons (several subjects indulged in satanic worship) and analyzes cases where a belief in demonic possession masked true mental illness. Skeptics be forewarned that Gallagher truly believes in demons. A Catholic, he calls them “cosmic” terrorists who despise humans and seek to “negate our loving personalities, destroy us spiritually…even cause our physical death.” The author doesn’t provide an explicit cosmology or theology for the origin of demons. In the name of confidentiality, he changes names and locations of his victims and the priests he worked with and doesn’t provide anchoring dates, making it difficult to further research his account. Nevertheless, this is a cogently written book on a fascinating subject. Believers will love it, unbelievers will relish an argument with its premises, and even the most skeptical will marvel at the mysteries of human behavior it investigates.
An unsettling, absorbing account of the phenomenon of demonic possession by a medical expert.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-287647-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
A powerful melding of image and text inspired by Instagram yet original in its execution.
Smith returns with a photo-heavy book of days, celebrating births, deaths, and the quotidian, all anchored by her distinctive style.
In 2018, the musician and National Book Award–winning author began posting on Instagram, and the account quickly took off. Inspired by the captioned photo format, this book provides an image for every day of the year and descriptions that are by turns intimate, humorous, and insightful, and each bit of text adds human depth to the image. Smith, who writes and takes pictures every day, is clearly comfortable with the social media platform—which “has served as a way to share old and new discoveries, celebrate birthdays, remember the departed, and salute our youth”—and the material translates well to the page. The book, which is both visually impactful and lyrically moving, uses Instagram as a point of departure, but it goes well beyond to plumb Smith’s extensive archives. The deeply personal collection of photos includes old Polaroid images, recent cellphone snapshots, and much-thumbed film prints, spanning across decades to bring readers from the counterculture movement of the 1960s to the present. Many pages are taken up with the graves and birthdays of writers and artists, many of whom the author knew personally. We also meet her cat, “Cairo, my Abyssinian. A sweet little thing the color of the pyramids, with a loyal and peaceful disposition.” Part calendar, part memoir, and part cultural record, the book serves as a rich exploration of the author’s fascinating mind. “Offered in gratitude, as a place to be heartened, even in the basest of times,” it reminds us that “each day is precious, for we are yet breathing, moved by the way light falls on a high branch, or a morning worktable, or the sculpted headstone of a beloved poet.”
A powerful melding of image and text inspired by Instagram yet original in its execution.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-44854-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
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