The Hand on the Mirror

March 9, 2015
When former Sacramento Bee publisher Durham lost her husband, Max Besler, to cancer in 2004, her religious faith and journalism training left her open to the possibility of an afterlife but skeptical about it. She began encountering lights that flickered, clocks stopping at the time her husband passed away, and most astonishingly, powdery handprints on the first, second, and third anniversaries of his death. These experiences launched Durham, daughter of a Presbyterian minister, into conversations with scientists and spiritual practitioners in an effort to understand what she witnessed. She documents her experience and the many interviews she did to pose the possibility that “life does not end with our physical death” and to marshal public support for research into the topic. Durham is credible and sincere in her quest, and her personal insights into how love transcends a human lifetime are moving. However, the book is unlikely to appeal to more theologically conservative Christians who are interested in heaven, because it fails to address how this view of the afterlife coheres with what the Bible says about death and the soul.

February 15, 2015
A widow contemplates the supernatural world after an unexplained series of occurrences. In 2005, on the one-year anniversary of her agnostic husband Max's death from esophageal cancer, retired newspaper publisher Durham discovered a "soft, white, powdery substance" on her bathroom mirror in the form of a handprint. Though mystified, as the daughter of a hypercritical mother and a Presbyterian minister who taught her the value of modesty and character, the author dismissed it, claiming that "entering the unknown was intimidating." Previous unexplained and less-reliable incidents included a clock stopped on the exact time of Max's death, flickering lights, pulsing walls, knocks on doors and ethereal "silky golden threads sailing horizontally in front of my face," yet still Durham (together with son, Tanner) retained a natural skepticism until she saw the handprint-which she removed. Attempting to both comprehend her grief and adapt a fresh spiritual perspective, the author writes casually of entertaining New-Age literature and a holistic, energy-healing conduit. Upon subsequent anniversaries of Max's death, "powdery images" and more handprints appeared on the same mirror (which she again removed), but Durham attempted to move forward in addition to dating a new beau, retiring and relocating from California to central Idaho. None of that mattered, however, once she discovered the rug she'd brought with her from Sacramento had begun to shift on its own and footprints appeared on the living room furniture. Her varied attempts to solve these personal mysteries brought her face to face with parapsychologists discussing multitiered consciousness and a phantom expert who believed the "conscious spirit" of Max might be responsible. Though ably chronicled, skeptical readers will remain frustrated at Durham's lack of credible scientific follow-through into the mirror images, despite the book's centerpiece of photographic evidence. A haunting and ultimately exasperating memoir leaving more unanswered questions than resolutions.

April 1, 2015

Durham, a former advertising executive at the Los Angeles Times and publisher of the Sacramento Bee, describes an emotional journey through the grief of losing her husband, Max, and the struggle to comprehend the unusual phenomena that followed his passing. The author seeks the expertise of an array of spiritual practitioners and scientists. This is by no means an objective or thorough exploration of perspectives on the existence of life after death--sometimes it's contradictory, not every authority is reliable, and some conclusions are a stretch. But it is an effective story about love, loss, and a universal search for meaning and understanding in life, and for that reason it may be appreciated by readers who enjoyed Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking. VERDICT Spiritually curious readers who have lost loved ones will identify with the author's quest for answers and may appreciate learning new ideas about fringe science and parapsychology. It's similar but more investigative than books such as Eben Alexander's Proof of Heaven, one of the specialists Durham consults. Those looking for a more skeptical book that delves into theories of life after death would do better with Mary Roach's Spook.--Rachel Hoover, Thomas Ford Memorial Lib., Western Springs, IL

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