Entertaining adventures in esoterica, with some serious side effects.
Reporter’s investigation finds that modern witchcraft, occult practices and mystical lifestyles are reflective of spirituality repressed by the march of science against faith.
Wicker, formerly the religion reporter for the Dallas Morning News, tells how her bestseller, Lily Dale (2003), about a town that has “talked” to its dead for decades, opened the door to multiple, intimate contacts with Americans who seem average in most ways except for their active participation in “magic.” She claims she had no trouble finding “wizards and vampires, Satanists and voodoo priestesses, high magicians and conjurers of the black arts” all over the U.S. Defining belief in magic as a conviction that powers beyond humankind can be obtained and controlled for one’s benefit, the author also points out that Judeo-Christian beliefs do not necessarily exclude it (e.g., Santería, Pentecostal rites). After arguing that a majority of people do, in fact, incorporate magic into their lives in the form of persistent superstitions that often become unconscious acts, the author embarks on an extended tour of the occult—everything from Wiccan covens (in Salem, Mass., natch) and voodoo ceremonies in graveyards to vampire fests and hex shops retailing mojos and kits for casting spells. A reporter’s seasoned skepticism leavens some of the more bizarre events; she notes, for example, that rituals incorporating sex acts in which men are in charge generally do not bode well for women. Eventually, though, a series of personal revelations culminates in an epiphany she has while taking Communion at Westminster Abbey. Wicker returns to her own faith and credits magic with helping her do so. “What we must not do—no matter what the scientists tell us—is allow ourselves to be cut off from our own experience of life as it presents itself.” She adds that it was “no accident” that “Jesus showed up in my dreams during the days when I was most avidly pursuing magic.”
Entertaining adventures in esoterica, with some serious side effects.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-072678-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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