This biography of a man who was most active when unconscious will excite those who already find Cayce’s unconsciousness...
An exhaustive biography of the legendary psychic (1877–1945), likely to entrance Cayce’s fans but try the patience of unbelievers.
Kirkpatrick (Lords of Sipan, 1992) received unprecedented access to the Cayce archives and conducted hundreds of interviews. The result is a thorough account of Cayce’s life, but not an objective one (since the author’s sympathies are clearly with the psychic). Biographical details are recounted in detail, from Cayce’s boyhood in Kentucky to his mundane early jobs to his sometimes-turbulent marriage. But most of the attention is given to his career as psychic healer, seer, and mystic. While in hypnotic trance, Cayce purportedly became the mouthpiece for an occult presence called the “Source,” which could diagnose illness, prescribe remedies (often involving unorthodox ingredients like tree bark), predict the future, discover hidden treasures, invent gadgets, offer career guidance, describe contemporary people’s past lives in ancient Egypt, supplement the Bible, map Atlantis, and discourse on “the design of the universe.” All this occurred in more than 14,000 documented sessions (called “readings”), choice samples of which are lovingly presented here. New Age devotees will probably find much of interest, although even they may find some portions ponderous: how much, after all, do we really need to know about Cayce the insurance salesman? The unconverted will be still more put off. At its best, Kirkpatrick’s account reads like magic realism, reporting wonders matter-of-factly and stirring in such famous visitors as Houdini and Edison; at its worst, it sounds annoyingly gullible, softening evidence that might count against Cayce, uncritically accepting Caycean versions of events, and making excuses for Cayce’s failures. His debacles as a psychic oil-driller, for example, are chalked up to not being “right with the Creative Forces.”
This biography of a man who was most active when unconscious will excite those who already find Cayce’s unconsciousness exciting—but it will probably leave others as mystified as before. (photos, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57322-139-2
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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