A brief but edifying remembrance that’s filled with poignant personal reflection, as well as moments of international...
A personal memoir about a man’s difficult relationship with his father, his search for enlightenment, and his obsession with tennis.
Debut author Cox’s dad worked in the U.S. Foreign Service, and as a result, he spent his own childhood traveling the globe. He was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1960, and he and his family went on to live in various places on several different continents; in 1965, for instance, they were evacuated from Saigon, Vietnam, as war arrived. Following in his father’s footsteps, the author became an avid tennis enthusiast, and even took lessons from a student of Pancho Gonzalez, one of the world’s best tennis players, while living in Laos. Cox relates his turbulent relationship with his father, whom he characterizes as cold and sometimes emotionally abusive; still, the author compulsively practiced his tennis game to win his dad’s praise—and to finally beat him on the court. In fact, he trained so tenaciously that the wear and tear on his body forced him to take an extended hiatus from the sport. Eventually, his mother remarried, and Cox joined his sister in the Pacific Northwest to go to college, where he again played tennis. There, he also became intensely interested in Eastern philosophy, meditation, and yoga; he trained at a holistic yoga center before accepting the life-changing mentorship of Dennis Adams, a self-proclaimed psychic. Throughout this memoir, Cox writes movingly of his lifelong search for inner peace, as well as about his uphill battle to free himself from the grim influence of a mercurial parent. He also arrestingly describes his own spiritual experiences on the path to enlightenment: “it felt like I was connected to everything that existed through small streams of energy or light. This web of light was a soft, conscious energy; it flowed between me and everything else in existence.” In the end, Cox delivers an intriguing life story that depicts Eastern spiritual practice as a tonic to Western culture.
A brief but edifying remembrance that’s filled with poignant personal reflection, as well as moments of international adventure.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2017
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
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
