A valuable guide to spiritual principles and practices that aptly covers the basics plus a few twists.
A shaman shares her wisdom in Marks and Spector’sself-help book.
As a child, Marks had visions, interacted with a silver-skinned spirit guide and, by power of thought, occasionally moved a ball suspended from the ceiling of her room, freaking out her friends. Luckily, Marks grew up in a home where psychic ability was the norm. In the workforce, she encountered trouble due to her heightened senses, particularly in a mental hospital, where the staff didn’t appreciate her empathic perceptions. A self-described “Jewbu”—a Jew embracing Buddhism—she would later develop into a “medical intuitive”capable of assessing an individual’s health by reading energy, sometimescatching what medical professionals missed. The book is divided into four parts: spirituality, practices, balance and the human condition, includingcautions against trying to be psychic without first laying the foundation through consistent practice of things such as meditation, which, the authors say, aids in releasing negative and positive emotions for an observer to achieve a neutral state—“the empty, silent space to just be.” A notable chapter deals with the significance of life force, noting that long-lived humans tend to be “completely self-involved.” Another addresses miracles, spotlighting a man who went into spontaneous remission from cancer after a potent lucid dream. The well-conceived book has a straightforward presentation void of ego. Although not as groundbreaking, some passages recall the teachings ofEsther and Jerry Hicks (i.e., embracing joy rather than focusing on past travails) and Eckhart Tolle (being present now). The author suggests “de-cording” from others—severing unhealthy energy ties at the chakras—which she compares to removing cookies from a computer’s operating system. Graciously, Marks puts herself on the line, telling of a male teacher who, feeling her acute anger, moved out of her line of fire: “[H]e kept telling me that I was sending ‘arrows’ at him….One day, he stood up and moved across the room, saying he wasn’t sitting in my line of sight.” Shortly thereafter, a window broke, presumably due to her energy, though neither of them had physically touched it. Marks says it illustrates a lesson: If one can heal, one can harm. For beginning and intermediate students on a lifelong spiritual journey, the reiteration of maxims such as thisshould prove beneficial.
A valuable guide to spiritual principles and practices that aptly covers the basics plus a few twists.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1493546916
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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