A chilling treat for those who believe the universe contains more than meets the eye.
Professional psychic Iacuzzo convincingly messes with the time-space continuum in her memoir of life in a dysfunctional family of clairvoyants.
Like her brother Frank, who went on to become a renowned psychic, the author had visions from an early age. She could moderate their steady flow (“I can choose to look away if I want to,” she later explained to a client), but she hadn’t a clue what they were all about. In addition to being terrified of her powers, young Terry was also afraid of her unpredictable mother. That may account for the quirky, shy, matter-of-fact menace of her book’s tone. It’s nothing, in Iacuzzo’s account, to spend day after day tripping on acid or wandering through the seamiest parts of New York City. She’s already seen it all while learning to steel herself against the parapsychological onslaught. Her story has the ring of authenticity, because Iacuzzo describes exactly what she experiences. Watching Lee Harvey Oswald get shot as a teenager, she writes, brought her abilities into focus: “A murder, an altering of life miles away, this real-life event as it was happening on a black-and-white television screen, showed me how my brain and my body worked. It gave me a way into my own visions . . . it was at this moment that I understood the power of my ability to direct myself to a specific place in time.” When she could call her visions into specific focus, she could “watch the future.” It wasn’t easy, though she had a knack for interpretation: once, seeing a vision of a woman rocking her empty arms, she realized that the client before her had just undergone an abortion. Apparently, she had some previous practice; other psychics told her that in an earlier life she was a magician and a priestess. Iacuzzo continues to work in New York City today.
A chilling treat for those who believe the universe contains more than meets the eye.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15235-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
