Witty and occasionally irreverent, Loustalot’s offbeat account provides probing insight into why we see psychics and,...
A memoirist looks to the great beyond to discover secrets held within.
In the wake of a painful breakup, Loustalot (This Is How You Say Goodbye, 2013, etc.) decided she would take the occasion of a pivotal life closure to engage in extended inquiry into the realm of psychics, astrologers, shamans, and the occult. The author felt that the unmooring of this transitional moment, coupled with her professional journalistic skepticism, made for the perfect atmosphere for questioning the present while remaining open to the future. Loustalot’s study is filled with intriguing encounters with individuals possessing occult talents both real and finely crafted. However, it is the grounding of her inquiry in her reaction to the present political moment (“2017 was a year of trauma”)—and her recognition that while most in the U.S. are still searching for purpose, “we have replaced religion with a vague notion of spirituality”—that lends this personal quest a broader, more sweepingly inclusive cast. As she writes, “2017 laid bare a new, undeniable fact: what we thought in the past was working for our country politically, socially, and empathetically was not.” This colossal misreading of the political climate, ironically, helped Loustalot relax and remain flexible regarding her social and spiritual lives. “I decided to (skeptically) open myself up to the possibility of (wonder) magic,” she writes. By the end of the book—after many trips to various seers and guides—the author is in a very different place, having seen friends hurt by legitimate psychic readings and learning harrowing stories of the vulnerable being swindled by sham mystics. Where she ends up on the divide between proof and faith is fascinating.
Witty and occasionally irreverent, Loustalot’s offbeat account provides probing insight into why we see psychics and, perhaps more importantly, how we listen to what they have to say.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0365-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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