Review by Library Journal Review
Compiled by Dyja (Play for a Kingdom), a series editor for Illumina Books, the fiction and nonfiction selections in this anthology of "epiphanies" deftly capture many varieties of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual unfolding. Anne Lamott's excerpt from Traveling Mercies chronicles a descent into an alcohol- and drug-induced hell, while Henry James's classic novella Beast in the Jungle uses spare language to recount a man's painful realization that he has spent decades awaiting a seismic life event that has in fact come and gone. Elsewhere, a Flannery O'Connor protagonist evolves from sharp-tongued hypocrite into a bizarre Southern vision of racial and social unity. Also included are excerpts from Joyce's Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man and Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Every now and then a truly useful anthology appears, and this is one; readers are sure to find both solace and good-natured humor among the many viewpoints represented. Susan A. Zappia, Paradise Valley Community Coll., Phoenix, AZ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Novelist Dyja (Play for a Kingdom, 1997) collects 13 pieces that illustrate moments of spiritual and personal awakening, when the veil of the quotidian seems to fall away or become transparent for a potentially life-changing glimpse of reality-of what and who we are, and in what kind of universe we live. It's hard to know what to make of this volume or of the Illumina series (of which this is a part) itself. Dyja includes excerpts from Trappist monk Thomas Merton, soul singer (and now minister) Al Green, Eugen Herrigel, Anne Lamott, James Joyce, Hermann Hesse, Jean Shepherd, Dennis Covington, and Bede Griffith-as well as from the work of Henry James, John Cheever, Flannery O'Connor, and Tolstoy. The editor's introduction gives the impression that he intended the series to be a collection of inspirational, life-changing titles that could be consulted by readers at various points of crisis in their lives. Well and good, but most anthologies will point the reader to previously unknown writers, or try to change the way we read a piece by creating a context for it. But here, there are few surprises: Most of these selections, and certainly the most powerful, will be familiar to many readers. The great exception is Covington's meticulously observed, subtly written, and profoundly disturbing account of his experience in a snake-handling Holiness church in rural Alabama: Anyone who missed this 1995 memoir will be well advised to read it in its entirety. If anything, however, some of these excerpts (e.g., from Merton, Joyce, Griffiths) lose a good deal by being removed form their original contexts-and others (Hesse, for instance) have their deficiencies exposed by the strengths of their neighbors. A sad case: the whole seems somewhat less than the sum of its (considerable) parts.
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