A spiritual autobiography especially strong in showing the importance of women as guides.
In this memoir, a psychotherapist recounts how she found meaning in her life through growth as a sexual being, creative artist, and spiritual individual.
Reis (Daughters of Saturn, 2006, etc.), born in 1940, writes that her memoir is “about making meaning at midlife,” a more difficult undertaking for women than the culture acknowledges. Reis looks at concerns like sex, money, meaningful work, partnership, and—crucially—her “place in a female lineage that was my birthright as a woman.” Her relationship with her mother, as well as correspondence and visits over many years with Ruth, a nun and Reis’ aunt, forms an important thread throughout the book. Reis’ dreams become another significant theme. After a degree in English literature, two illegal abortions, three marriages, and three divorces by her late 30s, she entered an MFA program in art at UCLA, financed by a large settlement from a divorce. This would allow her to pursue reading, world travel, artmaking, writing, feminist scholarship, vision quests, and a second master’s degree, in 1984, in depth psychology. Reis lived briefly “as a New Age nun” and a lesbian; in 1985, she met Jim Harrod, a psychotherapist and scholar of philosophical theology. They felt deeply connected, and she moved to Maine, Harrod’s home, where she began her psychotherapy practice. The two had an unofficial marriage ceremony in 1987. Over her life’s course, Reis concludes she was her “own still-unfolding revelation.” In presenting her story, the author speaks to women looking for a model of a life’s journey—not the hero’s journey so familiar from writers like Joseph Campbell, but a woman’s spiraling, reflective, meditative path, one that fully acknowledges relationships, community, and love. Many readers should be able to relate to her candidly reported explorations. But Reis doesn’t always fully acknowledge her privilege and agency. Of the hefty divorce settlement, she asks: “What price can be put on lost dreams?” And she describes euthanizing her two aging but healthy “country dogs” on moving to Los Angeles as a “loss” demanded of her, not a choice.
A spiritual autobiography especially strong in showing the importance of women as guides.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-121-8
Page Count: 360
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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