The promise of a dreamlike fantasy lapses slowly but surely into a soporific narrative.
An Air Force enlistee's curiosity about the occult leads him across Europe on a journey of New Age self-discovery.
Davis is both author and hero of this semi-autobiographical sequel to his first novel, Buchi (2006). “Spook,” as Spirit’s Air Force pals playfully call him, has known since he was a child that he was “different”–and not just because of his parents’ unorthodox choice of name. On a visit to Great Yarmouth on England’s eastern shore in 1961, the youthful Spirit finds himself being drawn to the small storefront of “Madam Logos, Fortune Teller–Astrologer–Psychic.” Inside, he meets octogenarian Athena Logos, who informs Spirit that he is indeed “different”: Spirit is an empath, able to psychically probe the innermost feelings of others. Athena and Spirit begin weekly excursions into worlds of astrology and metaphysics to prepare him for some special “purpose” to which he is destined. Before long, a series of visions and “vibes” begins to make Spirit suspect there’s more to this typecast old fortuneteller than meets the eye. Why does Athena refuse to meet his friends? Who is the strange young woman who keeps appearing to him in visions and dreams? When Athena’s sudden disappearance leaves him without a friend and guide, he sets out to the ancient ruins of the Temple of Poseidon in Greece in search of answers. Coming to his aid are a cast of friends, both skeptical and credulous, who nevertheless offer their full emotional support to him in his journey. Author Davis invests a great deal of warmth and bonhomie in Spirit’s friendships, but therein lies a critical misstep: Spirit’s encounters with other characters are so genial and good-natured that no real conflict–interpersonal or otherwise–mars Spirit’s breezy progression to finding the answers to his questions. Stories of self-discovery thrive on struggle, but here the protagonist need only “go with the flow” to arrive at journey’s end.
The promise of a dreamlike fantasy lapses slowly but surely into a soporific narrative.Pub Date: April 24, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4257-2953-0
Page Count: 204
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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