This biography of a man who was most active when unconscious will excite those who already find Cayce’s unconsciousness...
An exhaustive biography of the legendary psychic (1877–1945), likely to entrance Cayce’s fans but try the patience of unbelievers.
Kirkpatrick (Lords of Sipan, 1992) received unprecedented access to the Cayce archives and conducted hundreds of interviews. The result is a thorough account of Cayce’s life, but not an objective one (since the author’s sympathies are clearly with the psychic). Biographical details are recounted in detail, from Cayce’s boyhood in Kentucky to his mundane early jobs to his sometimes-turbulent marriage. But most of the attention is given to his career as psychic healer, seer, and mystic. While in hypnotic trance, Cayce purportedly became the mouthpiece for an occult presence called the “Source,” which could diagnose illness, prescribe remedies (often involving unorthodox ingredients like tree bark), predict the future, discover hidden treasures, invent gadgets, offer career guidance, describe contemporary people’s past lives in ancient Egypt, supplement the Bible, map Atlantis, and discourse on “the design of the universe.” All this occurred in more than 14,000 documented sessions (called “readings”), choice samples of which are lovingly presented here. New Age devotees will probably find much of interest, although even they may find some portions ponderous: how much, after all, do we really need to know about Cayce the insurance salesman? The unconverted will be still more put off. At its best, Kirkpatrick’s account reads like magic realism, reporting wonders matter-of-factly and stirring in such famous visitors as Houdini and Edison; at its worst, it sounds annoyingly gullible, softening evidence that might count against Cayce, uncritically accepting Caycean versions of events, and making excuses for Cayce’s failures. His debacles as a psychic oil-driller, for example, are chalked up to not being “right with the Creative Forces.”
This biography of a man who was most active when unconscious will excite those who already find Cayce’s unconsciousness exciting—but it will probably leave others as mystified as before. (photos, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57322-139-2
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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