An often riveting remembrance, especially for readers intrigued by accounts of supernatural experiences.
The memoir of one man’s apparently superhuman life.
Hedgepeth writes that, even as a child, he was a magnet for unusual occurrences. In 1971, he says, he witnessed a UFO flying past his bedroom window, and he felt that the evil forces surrounding the cylinder were the first sign of the spiritual warfare that would consume his life. Although he despised organized religion, he was convinced by missionaries to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He says that he went on to perform many miracles as a church elder, calling on the authority of the Melchizedek priesthood to heal the sick. Still, he was a free-spirited member of the congregation and was often chastised by church leaders for fixating on the “mysteries of God” rather than “sticking to the basic principles of the Gospel.” Such inflexibility caused him to part ways with the Mormon religion. This plunged him into a deep depression, he says, during which he attempted suicide in an effort to “explore other worlds.” Though he survived, he continued to struggle with diagnosed bipolar disorder. As a “last-ditch effort for personal peace,” he says, he set out on his first of four “vision quests,” which he says only made Christ’s power more apparent to him. He aligned himself with the Christian church and became a freelance minister. Overall, Hedgepeth’s testimony is fantastically engaging, shaped by sharp humor (“The state of Florida had always been ahead of the rest of the American South in number of assholes per square mile”) and refined prose (“It felt as if the radiance of my soul had been siphoned out of my body”). Nonreligious skeptics, however, will need to suspend their disbelief to get the most out of the book. The overall narrative structure also weakens the storytelling, as Hedgepeth devotes large blocks of text to flashbacks to his childhood and early adult years, which continually disrupts the narrative flow.
An often riveting remembrance, especially for readers intrigued by accounts of supernatural experiences.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4834-6298-1
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2017
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 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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