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 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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