Washington Mystics Books

This is a lovely story about love and loss. Kristin Hannah has a wonderful way of weaving a story and developing characters. I felt particularly connected to Annie and her journey of love, betrayal, and self-discovery. While this story may have been a bit predictable, it was incredibly tender and sweet. This was my second KH book (Firefly Lane--VERY good!), and most certainly not the last.

On Mystic Lake by Kristin Hannah was a cut above most contemporary romances. It is a story about a wealthy 39 year-old Stamford graduate (heroine) who finds herself dumped by her handsome, successful but unfaithful husband, after 20 years of marriage. After dropping their 17 year old daughter Natalie at the airport for her senior year in England, Annie's husband, Blake tells her he wants a divorce and he is in love with an attorney from his office.

After her husband unexpectedly asks for a divorce Annie Colwater returns to her home town to think things through. Nick Delacroix was her first love. His wife has recently died and Annie takes over the job of babysitting his daughter Izzy. Nick is a cop and stays out way too late, drinks too much and pretty much ignores his daughter because he can't deal with his own pain. The part I thought was most interesting was concerning Izzy. She felt that she was disappearing. Her fingers, her hand, her arm. She really believed that she was slowly becoming invisible. Maybe from the lack of love and attention from her one remaining parent. She did see her mother as a beautiful ghost by the water and spoke to her several times. As Izzy became more confident and her father began to really see her again, her fingers began to reappear little by little. Very interesting premise! I enjoyed this book very much. The family dynamics were so real and so relative to our times. Children feeling lost and disappearing right before our eyes. Only love brought Izzy back.

i loved this story of love lost and found. kh is wonderful getting the feelings down pat. the only point i did not like in the book is where she names her daughter after her lovers dead wife, even if she was her best friend. nick chose kathy over annie when they were young. i think that i would be very uncomfortable with kathleen as a first name, maybe the middle name. it just doesn't feel right.

I picked this book up at a vacation rental we were staying this summer for something to read while I was there for the week, it's not normally what I'd pick out to read. I started reading it on the beach, and totally got sucked in! FInished it within a few days. I'm normally hard to please, hard to find a book to keep my focus and keep me entertained, but there were enough trials/tribulations/and twists to keep me going. I really identified with the emotions and thoughts of the Annie, the main character. All the characters really grew on me and I'm wishing there'd be a sequel!

Washington has assembled an interesting and accessible overview of the "useful" life of Theosophy and its ancillary movements. Beginning with the ascendancy of Madame Blavatsky and ending with the death of Krisnamurti, the book charts the meandering course of Theosophy as it grows, changes, and ultimately succumbs to the entropy caused by too many strong leaders each with their own differing interpretations of the meaning of life.

The book is well-written and an enjoyable read. Keep in mind that Madame Blavatsky provides more of a backdrop than a focus of this book - far more attention is dedicated to Krishnamurti and Gurdjueff than Madame herself. And while the subtitle indicates that the book tells the story of those who "Brought Spiritualism to America," very little emphasis is placed on American spiritualism.

Washington's writing is clear, but his tone verges on smugly sarcastic at times. Certainly the downright silliness of the material merits this occasionally, but he can come off as very insensitive to his subjects.

I found this book to be quite a good read. Yes, Mr. Washington is clearly skeptical about the Theosophical Movement but he is hardly the first. I think reading ISIS UNVEILED or THE SECRET DOCTRINE would not cause most people to conclude that Washington is wrong to be skeptical. Many of the negative reviews attack his facts but few cite concrete examples. Scroeder (T) does. He claims that Washington places Madame Blavatsky's death in 1909 not its correct 8 May 1891. In my copy of the book, on page 100, Washington writes that Madame Blavatsky died on 8 May 1891. As one who grew up in Fort Wayne myself, Scroeder (T), please help me and supply a citation for the 1909 reference.

Excellent history tracing the beginnings of New Age thinking and where its roots began. The current new Age movement has its antecedents in the past, which this book sets out to document in an interesting way. The cast of characters that the author brings to life, sheds light on some the the dubious claims made by these so-called spiritual teachers. If you have an open mind, this book is an eye-opener and is a sober assessment of this time period which has great resonance with today.

On superficial examination the book appears to be well-researched and objective. But a more careful inspection -- especially of the theosophic section, to which these remarks are limited -- discloses serious errors and omissions. Aside from fairly obvious use of innuendo and half-truths to bolster his negative conclusions about H. P. Blavatsky and Katherine Tingley, the author is frequently inaccurate, misrepresents theosophic teaching, relies on uncorroborated assertion (often from unfriendly secondary and tertiary sources), omits rebuttal evidence, garbles dates, events, and attributions, downgrades, trivializes, and generally gives a one-sided account. Whatever merit the book may have is defeated by its unreliability and prejudice.
One would expect any author who writes on historical subjects to use primary sources as far as possible. There is no record of Peter Washington contacting the Theosophical Society and its considerable historical resources, either to verify facts or to interview staff members and living witnesses who are perhaps better informed about Blavatsky, Tingley, Purucker, and theosophical history. Washington's scholarly competence and objectivity may be deduced from his errors and omissions, misinformation, misattribution and evident reliance on secondary or tertiary sources. Peter Washington in fact gives very little description of theosophy as presented by HPB and her teachers, and what he does mention is often inaccurate or out of context.

Except for the eyes, Helena Blavatsky "looked overall like a badly wrapped and glittering parcel."

And with that, Peter Washington is off to the races. In a way, there is no reason for people who do not believe in spooks to care about Madame Blavatsky and her progeny, apart from the practical fact that she introduced cremation into America, which up until the 1870s had been an exclusively burying nation. For the first century after she began, the numbers of Theosophists and their numerous offshoots were small. Washington does not attempt to enumerate them, but they could hardly have outnumbered even such small sects as Jehovah's Witnesses.

But they were so funny. Sympathetic people will feel a tug at the heartstrings at the hopeless search for inner contentment by the mystics. Heartless people, like myself, will read with glee of the self-inflicted psychic wounds of these nuts, who are summarized by Washington in one place as "the neurotic, the hysterical, the destructive and the downright mad" and in another as "bossy matrons, artistic maiden ladies, wealthy idealists and faddists of every variety."

By what must have been an effort of self-denial as heroic as anything Gurdjieff or Leadbeater ever demanded of their acolytes, Washington manages not to simply jeer for 400 pages. His occasional jabs are all the funnier for not being overdone.

In a sense, though, the last laugh is on Washington and the rest of us sane people. After three or four generations of strife, hilarity, thievery, libel, betrayal, adultery etc. by what were basically small coteries of people who had inherited money but not sense, the Theosophists, although the formal group is quite decayed, have spread their attitudes widely, if shallowly, throughout American popular culture.

The story of how this developed is amusing and almost beyond belief, but Washington, professor of literature at Middlesex, has the documents and some personal interviews to back him up.

Most of the leading spiritualists were compulsive writers, and besides being incomprehensible, their works are tedious past belief. How Washington was able to plow through the hundreds of volumes of this literature is really more astonishing than any of the claims the spiritualists themselves ever made, except bringing people back from the dead.