Engaging leap-of-faith answers to the big questions.
Entrepreneurial advice and astonishing tales from a tire company founder and pitchman retracing his spiritual journey.
Charles “Chuck” Curcio first made his mark starring in his own late-night television commercials for Tire Kingdom, the highly successful South Florida–based company he built from scratch. The inventive musical parodies and his colorful personality have achieved near-cultish adoration; the ads are still viewable on YouTube. But in this cosmological autobiography, Curcio says he always had other talents, particularly as a healer and psychic. One October morning in 1995, his life changes forever when he pauses beneath a banyan tree while riding a golf cart across his 10-acre Jupiter Island oceanfront estate. From out of the blue—and out of the author’s own mouth—God speaks to him, asking if he is ready to fulfill his purpose as a divine servant. It’s the dawning of a new day, as referenced in the title. So, Curcio embarks on a fantastic—arguably a bit too fantastic—journey of metaphysical discovery that, he says, is now more open than ever for all humanity to join. His path leads him to the Great Pyramid in Egypt to the healers and channelers of Brazil and elsewhere, and ultimately to Delphi University of Spiritual Studies in Georgia, where he’s a director and teacher. Along the way, he leaves his wife and children for his teacher and soul mate, a striking blonde with exceptional psychic credentials whose entry into Curcio’s life had been foretold to him. Curcio doesn’t merely believe in what the earthbound would call miracles; he witnesses and performs them frequently and even suggests that his healing work extends to curing the gravely ill and raising the dead. A chapter entitled “Signs and Wonders” begins with the author’s bare back to the sun as he absorbs what he calls the Christ energies, “which many believe emanate from the Sun.” This spiritualist path will be a revelation to the uninitiated, as will many of the book’s other esoteric, believe-it-or-not pronouncements. Gratuitously over-the-top asides may further raise doubts about the veracity of the whole. In one example, Curcio says he can send love over telephone lines, such that loved ones on the other end feel their receivers warming from the abundance of love energy. The latter part of the book is pure Christian–Eastern mystic theology, where explanations of reincarnation and karma appear to show clear understanding of these theories. Why did God come out of the void in the first place? As He tells Curcio, “Charles, I just couldn’t contain my Self.”
Engaging leap-of-faith answers to the big questions.Pub Date: May 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-0578105567
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Delphi University Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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