Those interested in attending a sesshin will find Landrum’s book useful, though the tight focus on the author’s individual...
Landrum, a woman well-practiced in helping others overcome difficulty and achieve success, offers her insights into the Japanese practice of sesshin through her personal journal.
To one unfamiliar with the practice of sesshin, this book at first appears to contain a misspelling. But Landrum, a behavioral health therapist, quickly clears that up, explaining the type of extended meditation involved in and encompassed by a sesshin. She then explains her purpose with this book—to demonstrate, through giving an account of her experience, what a sesshin is, specifically for those who may be interested in attending one. She then details her experience with a weeklong sesshin among California’s redwoods, during which she spent most of her time in meditation with a group. While Landrum’s details are fascinating and very specifically re-create her experience, it’s occasionally hard to tell if the book is targeted at outside readers with a general interest in the practice of sesshin or whether the details of Landrum’s experience are overly personal. Some of the information she gives, while important to her experience, would not necessarily be applicable to the majority of sesshin attendees. For instance, near the end of the week, Landrum struggles with the way one of the group leaders tries to control her and she ends up not attending most of the remaining group times. This is certainly key to her personal journey through the sesshin, but would probably not happen to most attendees. Some readers might wish Landrum’s journal had undergone another edit, so that she could share information relevant to a sesshin without airing personal issues. However, the details Landrum gives are not embarrassing and do not qualify as over-sharing, just potentially uninteresting to those in search of facts about attending a sesshin. But as the documentation of one individual’s experience within the practice of a sesshin, Landrum’s story nicely demonstrates the journey a soul can make through such a unique undertaking.
Those interested in attending a sesshin will find Landrum’s book useful, though the tight focus on the author’s individual experience may be too specific for general application.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456846664
Page Count: 54
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Newsworthy brief by ufologist Vallee (Confrontations, 1990, etc.) on how the Iron Curtain hid from Western eyes not only a people in chains but also perhaps a star-fleet's worth of UFOs and their bug-eyed occupants. It was on the heels of the notorious Voronezh sightings of 1989 and the first warm breezes of glasnost that Vallee was invited by the Soviet press agency Novosti to visit the USSR to meet with leading Soviet ufologists. In this chronological account of that trip, the author blends pungent travelogue with crisp science reporting, noting, for instance, that ``the depression that engulfs you as you get closer to the Soviet Union is not a delusion....It was as if light itself had been confiscated. There was a dreary blanket over the airport buildings, the dusty air, the people themselves.'' Yet upon his arrival Vallee found myriad scientists eager to exchange notes—an ironic result, he realized, of ``censorship itself,'' which had forced Soviet ufology into ``unofficial networks'' where it flourished. In sit-downs with Soviet researchers, he discussed in detail the Tunguska explosion of 1908 (perhaps caused by destruction of a nuclear-powered craft), the Voronezh incidents, and about 40 other close encounters, and marvelled at the widespread Soviet technique of ``biolocation''—a kind of dowsing of ``biological fields''—to investigate UFOs. He also visited the cosmonauts' training center, learning—and here reporting apparently for the first time in the West—that Yuri Gagarin was drunk when he fatally crashed his airplane. And, gratifyingly, Vallee found considerable Soviet interest in his core theory that UFOs are extradimensional, not extraterrestrial. A ``preliminary catalogue'' of Soviet UFO sightings appends the text. An intriguing example of glasnost in action and an important ufological document opening up rich new veins of exploration for researchers and buffs alike. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-345-37396-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
Next time you glance at your watch and find a few minutes missing, better rush to your local hypnotist—you, too, might have been unwittingly kidnapped by a UFO. So Jacobs seems to suggest, estimating that over a million Americans have been abducted in recent years. ``We have been invaded,'' he proclaims, warning that ``the aliens have powers and technology greatly in advance of ours.'' Odd words, coming from a professor of history at Temple Univ., and a sign of the extreme oddity of the phenomenon, which Jacobs explores through extensive structural analysis. Each stage of a typical abduction, including the most sensational—the sexual encounters and reproductive experiments found in nearly all cases—are scrutinized through firsthand transcripts of hypnotic-regression interviews with more than 60 victims. The conclusion? That aliens are impregnating earth women in order to create quasi-human ``hybrids'' for some unknown purpose. The mind reels, but the sober, obviously terrified abductees make a strong case for the veracity of their experience. Jacobs's own presentation is a mixed blessing: His scholarship is punctilious, but he reveals the zeal of the converted in his debunking, after slight analysis, of all earth-bound explanations for UFO abductions (hysterical contagion, psychogenic fugue states, temporal-lobe dysfunction, and the like). By bringing solid scholarship to the pioneering efforts of Bud Hopkins and the hot prose of Whitley Strieber, this marks the next stage in UFO abduction research—and is just as likely to fly off the supermarket bookracks.
Pub Date: March 12, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-74857-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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