A lament that at certain moments, for its intensity, can break your heart.
Picardie’s (Music Man, 1990) search for contact with her sister, who died from breast cancer in 1997, has both lightness and ache, the melancholy of being condemned to live on after the death of one so loved, yet a willingness to explore “what lies beyond the edge of the expected.”
“When someone dies, they do not always disappear out of your life. You have a relationship with them: a relationship that changes, that begins to accommodate their silence.” But maybe not so easily: For years, that silence in Picardie’s life tore her to pieces. So she started an investigation into mystical approaches that might let her communicate with her sister Ruth. Written in the form of a diary, in a polished voice capable of both intense poignancy and dry humor, she tells of chasing spirits with the College of Psychic Studies and the Society for Psychical Research, with sensitives consequential and mortifyingly inconsequential, with spirit channelers who “translate a vast textured multidimensional image into linear language,” ghosts living in computer spell-checking systems, electronic voice phenomena, even a training course in mediumship, where, in a trance class, “I close my eyes to try to find the white light but keep getting distracted by elderly John’s snoring.” It isn’t Picardie’s intent to poke holes in the paranormal’s art; she is genuinely hunting for her sister, and her psychic encounters are eye-opening, to say the least. But she certainly runs up against some strange characters, from thought-form removalists to Living Energy Universe proponents, all portrayed with deft strokes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, personal reflections of family members, living and dead, seem to yield the most powerful connections when she feels “sure that Ruth’s spirit is there . . . our hearts combine, briefly, fiercely, soundlessly,” and she can hear Ruth whisper, “You are me.”
A lament that at certain moments, for its intensity, can break your heart.Pub Date: June 10, 2002
ISBN: 1-57322-211-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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