Vance details her coming-of-age in the 1970s, including her journey of self-discovery, spiritual awakening and acceptance of self that has lasted four decades.
A child of divorce in the tumultuous ’70s, Vance experiments with drugs, sex and spirituality starting with the Jesus Movement and trekking through a variety of world religions and belief systems on her walk-about quest for spiritual enlightenment. Her journey takes her around the world and includes an ever-changing cast of lovers and friends, beginning with Burkhard, the man who would be her first love and the one who first betrayed her. Her experiences illuminate the darker side of humanity and include date rape, abuse and five abortions, yet each are instrumental in leading her deeper in her quest for understanding. Those moments in her life finally open her up to the concept that, in her words, “[w]e are all in a very sophisticated holographic virtual reality game.” Her belief that those involved with organized religions are unenlightened is implied throughout while she enthusiastically touts the freedom and oneness with the universe that is achieved with meditation and remembrance of past lives. Peace is ultimately achieved when she realizes that relationships are contracted and agreed upon before birth in an effort to work out negative energy and ensure that karma is satisfied. While the essence of the book reminds one of Elizabeth’s Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love (2007), Vance’s choppy prose lacks the finesse and flow of that work; Vance transitioning from past to present and future within a single paragraph. For those that share Vance’s search for understanding, the memoir will spur an increased determination to delve into the mysteries of life. Those who follow conventional belief systems will find the book a random collection of philosophies and ideas formed into predictable New Age chatter. A candid, unrefined look at one woman’s spiritual quest.
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-1466326651
Page Count: 292
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2012
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 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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