A haunting and ultimately exasperating memoir leaving more unanswered questions than resolutions.
A widow contemplates the supernatural world after an unexplained series of occurrences.
In 2005, on the one-year anniversary of her agnostic husband Max’s death from esophageal cancer, retired newspaper publisher Durham discovered a “soft, white, powdery substance” on her bathroom mirror in the form of a handprint. Though mystified, as the daughter of a hypercritical mother and a Presbyterian minister who taught her the value of modesty and character, the author dismissed it, claiming that “entering the unknown was intimidating.” Previous unexplained and less-reliable incidents included a clock stopped on the exact time of Max’s death, flickering lights, pulsing walls, knocks on doors and ethereal “silky golden threads sailing horizontally in front of my face,” yet still Durham (together with son, Tanner) retained a natural skepticism until she saw the handprint—which she removed. Attempting to both comprehend her grief and adapt a fresh spiritual perspective, the author writes casually of entertaining New-Age literature and a holistic, energy-healing conduit. Upon subsequent anniversaries of Max’s death, “powdery images” and more handprints appeared on the same mirror (which she again removed), but Durham attempted to move forward in addition to dating a new beau, retiring and relocating from California to central Idaho. None of that mattered, however, once she discovered the rug she’d brought with her from Sacramento had begun to shift on its own and footprints appeared on the living room furniture. Her varied attempts to solve these personal mysteries brought her face to face with parapsychologists discussing multitiered consciousness and a phantom expert who believed the “conscious spirit” of Max might be responsible. Though ably chronicled, skeptical readers will remain frustrated at Durham’s lack of credible scientific follow-through into the mirror images, despite the book’s centerpiece of photographic evidence.
A haunting and ultimately exasperating memoir leaving more unanswered questions than resolutions.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-3130-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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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