A feel-good story for like-minded readers who also seek “the love and compassion of the Universe.”
How the author “left medicine to pursue a radically different path,” as she embarked on “the messy process of finding my connection to the Divine and learning to trust its guidance.”
Fans of Seidelmann’s previous work (Born to Freak: A Salty Primer for Irrepressible Humans, 2012, etc.) will surely enjoy this chronicle of the author’s chaotic transformation from a fourth-generation physician to a shamanic healer and life coach. The author details her travels around the globe, including sojourns to South Africa, India, and the California desert, searching for her inner shaman. After one shamanic workshop, the author returned home intent on decluttering her house. “As I let go of more and more layers,” she writes, “I felt better and better. I found that I could appreciate and engage with the things that remained. Thank you, wonderful salad bowl! Thank you, beloved grey sweater!” This book will appeal most to readers who can relate to those sentiments or have strong feelings about spirit animals, ghosts, disembodied spirits, and palo santo incense. For others, the narrative will be a slog, as the author’s constant inner turmoil and self-reflection become tiresome (“I frequently thought to myself: What have I done?”) and offer few lasting insights for those not undergoing similar experiences. Seidelmann wasn’t the only member of the family seeking a more meaningful life. Her husband, also a physician, began his own journey, and during his vision quest he “focuse[d] on awakening a potential primal energy lying coiled like a serpent at the base of his spine.” The author’s prose is serviceable, but depending on each reader’s tolerance for New Age spiritualism, the narrative will either produce maddening impatience or intense curiosity.
A feel-good story for like-minded readers who also seek “the love and compassion of the Universe.”Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-57324-701-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Conari Press
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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