An inspiring, personality-driven tour of a spirited medium’s life and experiences with the great beyond.
A psychic medium shares his personal history and how his clients have made a lasting impact on his spiritual livelihood.
In his effervescent memoir, Holp combines personal stories from his diverse clientele alongside confessions about his difficult coming-out process and the cultivation of his psychic spirit talents. Growing up in rural western Ohio with ultraconservative Christian parents, the author feared coming out and instead honed his abilities to conjure communications with deceased relatives through a Ouija board. As an adult, Holp enjoyed a 17-year career as a makeup artist, but his life became unmanageable due to alcohol dependency, self-hatred, and unaddressed emotional pain. When a supernatural chorus of voices offered hope and direction, Holp’s life was saved and he decided to follow those voices into a career giving tarot readings and working as a psychic medium channeling the deceased and helping surviving relatives move on and heal. Holp is keenly attuned to “the energy that exists beyond our physical senses” and believes that everyone is comprised of eternal and boundless energy and frequencies. He doesn’t believe in coincidences and insists, instead, that they are perfectly timed messages from our loved ones, spirit guides, or angels. Evidence of his extrasensory, “magical and synchronistic” abilities are on fine display in a succession of client readings, some involving deceased relatives delivering postmortem messages of hope and love to grieving loved ones. As his popularity grew as a medium, he struggled to find love and make a true personal connection to romance. His visions and intuitive perception are a unique gift, he acknowledges, and ones he is grateful for and never takes for granted. Leavened with light humor and suffused with earnestness and a bevy of proactive if well-worn platitudes, Holp believes everyone has the ability to channel wisdom and create an enriching experience with it. Whether dismissed as hokum or praised as an otherworldly miracle, Holp universally radiates the kind of positivity everyone could use more of right now: “We are loved beyond measure,” he implores, “and there is always hope.”
An inspiring, personality-driven tour of a spirited medium’s life and experiences with the great beyond.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781954118928
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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