Pagans, spiritualists, and other open-minded thinkers will relish this memoir.
A Wiccan practitioner shares 40 years of magic in this memoir.
In a series of vignettes about her experiences and development as a self-described shamanic witch, Fallingstar (White as Bone, Red as Blood: The Storm God, 2011, etc.) draws on themes of spirituality, history, psychology, and also addresses social and political issues. Early chapters tell the story of the author as a young girl, when she says she started to get hints that there was magic in the world and that it was an integral part of her own soul. Readers meet her family, friends, and kindred spirits she met over the years—an eclectic band of companions—as she recounts their shared experiences. Some chapters take a rollicking trip through the 1970s hippie subculture, in which she was an enthusiastic participant; in them, she writes of acid trips (in one, a giant baby gorilla battles with a god that’s “entirely composed of seething, flickering blue fire”) and free love (her ethical code was to “never to sleep with a married man unless I was also sleeping with his wife”). The chapters fly by, as most are only three or four pages long, and Fallingstar’s wry, witty observations are amusing; for example, she likens one Wiccan principle to the no-refund policy at her favorite Chinese restaurant (“When we don’t like what we have ordered from life’s menu, we can’t just send it back”). Readers will find it fun to skip around, which is easy to do, as the author’s story isn’t strictly chronological; the first half is broadly about her childhood and the latter, her development into a Wiccan practitioner. Skeptics will find some portions difficult to accept, such as her accounts of past-life memories of being burned as a witch. However, the book effectively dispels notions that witches are generally motivated by evil, and the author expresses her love of nature, noting that she “always prefer[s] to look for logic, to assume the supernatural is actually just super natural—something in nature we just don’t understand yet.” Her closing words aptly quote the 1970 film Little Big Man: “Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t.”
Pagans, spiritualists, and other open-minded thinkers will relish this memoir.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-699-2
Page Count: 280
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2020
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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