Customer Reviews

Space Between the Stars: My Journey to an Open Heart

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This is an intimate, revealing, highly readable memoir of an exciting, unusual, and deeply examined life. Deborah Santana's beautifully written book allows the reader to accompany her on a heady trip through San Francisco in the 1960's and 70's, as she takes us on a backstage tour complete with sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll.

But this is much more than a hip jaunt though the wild worlds of music and celebrity. It is also a journey through times of social, political and personal upheaval and awakening. It is a story of coming of age that is filled with romance and motherhood, mysticism and business, loneliness and family, fear and strength. Her honest, heartfelt, and often funny account can also be a source of inspiration and solace due to her remarkable honesty and her ability to overcome prejudice, insecurity, abuse, heartbreak, and loss.

Ultimately it is the triumphant tale of a courageous woman who has experienced pain and privilege, hardship and success and faced them all with real sincerity, humility, spirituality, and, most of all, love.

Deborah Santana is a powerful, eloquent writer who uses words like prisms through which we can learn to see the world, and ourselves, in new ways.

This isn't your ordinary "wife-of-celebrity memoir." Deborah King Santana is the daughter of an Irish-English professional woman and an African-American jazz musician, brought up in a sheltered, secure life, with pride in herself and her heritage. Her adult life will be neither sheltered nor secure-and never ordinary.

Deborah meets Sly Stone as a teenager. She is totally unprepared for his world, but is so charmed and seduced by him, that she enters it, complete with music, drugs, abuse, and shame. When she finally finds the strength to leave him, she soon meets Carlos Santana, already a Grammy-winning rock superstar, and though she tells herself to wait, immediately begins a relationship with him.

Over three decades as Santana's wife, she'll experience the world of a touring musician, a meditative life with an oppressive guru, unfaithfulness by Santana, three children, near financial ruin, and the exhilaration of starting a successful business. Most important, she discovers the emergence of a sense of herself, and what it means to be true to that self.

Santana unfolds her story without judgment of the person who made the decisions she did. Santana the writer allows Deborah's understanding of each part of her life to emerge slowly and naturally. As much as is possible when looking back over time, we get a sense of what she felt and experienced as it happened, and then what she did with it.

Her writing is sensual - the feel of skin, the sense of light, music's blood-level rhythm describe her life intimately. It is also sensible - she looks back on her life not as isolated incidents adding up to something, but as stages of becoming. She describes herself with honesty, and fills the page with adjectives and adverbs, leaving nothing to chance in how we will understand her world. It's not a celebrity memoir at all, but a deep look at what this woman, who happens to be married to a famous man, is made of.

This is an excellent read if you want to learn what is like to be part of a famous musician's life-with all its perks and pitfalls.

What a wonderfully, powerful love story filled with spiritual transformation. The Sanatana's 35 year relationship is an unusual chronicle or friendship, love,family, and loyalty. I could not put it down; from the first page I was hooked! It filled my Sunday afternoon with such unexpected joy and elation... it has made me look at mo own relationship with an artist very, very differently. Now I can see with eyes of unconditional love and non-judgement and compassion and most of all... understanding.

I thought this book was wonderful. It is written with a genuine and honest feeling. A lot of the things that were written in this book really hit home with me - the average person. I want to thank Deborah Santana for a wonderful, open, and genuine book.

I just completed Space Between the Stars. When I closed the book there was a sense of a winding epic poem coming to a gracefully profound close. Deborah Santana's memoirs sing with the spirit of Earth, Wind, Air and Fire. The book reads much like a novel and I had to remind myself that it was a recounting of many lives through the eyes, heart and soul of one.

Santana is a masterful storyteller/illuminator, bringing beloved [powerful] family members to life, bringing Carlos to life in ways I felt blessed to witness. It is clear that Deborah Santana honors all her relationships, even through painful experiences, as she extracts the nectar and finds peace within herself to transcend the rest. She makes evident that the Journey of her Life includes everyone and everything she's come to experience, and that there is Beauty in all of it.

I'm honored to be privy to Deborah Santana's world, those she holds dear, and the gift of her fine writing. Space Between the Stars is a healing, vibrant and wonderful testament to Living with an open heart, and to the joy that comes with expressing it.

Thank You Deborah Santana. You are a divine Light.


Bead

Rebeccasreads highly recommends SPACE BETWEEN THE STARS as an extraordinarily elegant, often plangent & frequently lambent memoir that illuminates the feminine side of the last half of the 20th Century & the racism in an era when race relationships were on a cusp, & the children of biracial couples were vilified.

From defying parents to loss of innocence & abortions to college & a new love - the great guitarist Carlos Santana. Together they become disciples to a guru & his religious movement. This is an important aspect of that era: when gurus, of all stripes, came out of India, drawing to themselves eager & naive searchers for the way to godliness. They brought their own brands of mind-control, dominance & rewards, all exotically wrapped up in 100% devotion, pure living through meditation, community activism & evangelizing.

Deborah Santana brilliantly describes the euphoria, the magical attraction of someone so revered, & the gladsome sense of belonging & achievement. She also bluntly records the descent from favored disciples into disillusionment, excommunication & separation.

On into the world of Carlos Santana, his family, his music & their marriage. When they decide to start a family, Deborah Santana's memories are bright with ardor, insights & a growing maturity. & then, the evil of infidelity sneaks in, & more lessons are to be learnt.

SPACE BETWEEN THE STARS is engrossing, evocative & memorable.

I really enjoyed this book. Before reading I didn't know that much about Deborah and certainly not enough about Carlos. Amazing story of true love and devotion.

For the first two-thirds of Deborah Santana's autobiography, I was very worried. Sisterly concern radiated from me like a constantly buzzing red light of warning. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. Be careful! That man, that guru, that drug, that situation is not right. Keep away! Stop! Reboot! What are you thinking, you foolish naive little girl?

Well obviously all of Deborah's experiences are in the past, and she successfully navigated them to her present apparently self-realized state. And of course my cautionary voice came from... where? Oh yes, the voice of experience. Is this a generational thing? Or a Women-Coming-of-Age-in-the-USA thing?

Those of us born in the 1950's and before were, at least subliminally, instructed to put aside our own personalities in order to grace the life of a man or a god. Yet we came of age during a time in the US when women as a gender were carving out new roles and civil rights. This clash of philosophies led many of us to what we gently refer to as "adventures" or " interesting circumstances". At least this happened to those of us who sought to embrace the greater world and the myriad of opportunities it presented. After all, we had freedoms never or rarely afforded women before - but little in the way of experience or wise grannies to temper us.

Still - how could someone raised in what appears to have been a loving open-minded family tilt so headlong into such tawdry difficulties? It all comes down to naiveté and the desire for love, and so many of us have been there. Deborah abandons her own ego to that of the abusive and drug addicted Sly Stone. Then abandons it again to guru Sri Chinmoy, and yet again to Carlos Santana. She finally seems to begin to get her identity together when she has children and realizes that even if her beloved husband has a roving eye, she still has worth and purpose. But it none-the-less remains based on glomming her personality onto that of another: Sly, Chinmoy, Santana, babies. Even the book title describes her as a void between brilliant bodies of light. Primordial ooze aside, methinks there is still self-realization to be achieved here. And I believe she is currently doing this through the Milagro Foundation, her family's philanthropic outreach.

What is ultimately so marvelous about this book is that Deborah articulates eloquently the struggle so many of us in our generation have had to reconcile purpose and identity in a material society. Although she writes of racism, I see her story as more of a cautionary tale of sexism, the gullibility of young sheltered women, and, above all, the need for love that is so strong it can blind the seeker to all logic and reason. For this reason, the book is a fantastic book club read. Less inspiration than commiseration, it serves as a wonderful stimulus to discussion of our role as women, how this is evolving, and where it needs to go.

Having lived a different life in the sixties, I felt like Beulah in 'Field of Dreams'...'No, I think you had two fifties and moved right into the seventies.'And, though my life was different and extremely conservative, I found within this detailed account of a person's most private and profound observations a vein of truth that runs through all womankind: a need to love and be loved; a quest for some expression of individuality and, ultimately, a desire to live an honest life with integrity.

I first read an excerpt of Deborah Santana's work in 'Daily Word' and was struck by her statement, "For many years, I felt insignificant, with no outer light of my own to shine." I, too, felt a kinship to that statement. How had Deborah transcended a stairway to her own 'light' and self-worth? I realize now that all women have an opportunity in their life to make a difference and contribute...usually in a much different way than our counterpart and for that I'm thankful.

I don't know what I expected when I ordered this book. Maybe gossip and/or glossed over information. A few years later, I was planning to give the book away and realized I should at least skim through it. I read it one afternoon and then the next evening, read parts again that I read too quickly. There isn't any gossip or sugar coating. If you are looking for inner peace you have probably traveled a few of the roads the author and her husband took. You may have become disenchanted and finally realized it will come from within if you allow it and/or know how to allow it. I found it amazing that the things her mother went through with a mixed marriage and children, the author also went through in her own marriage. Things didn't really change in 20+ years with society. Love is a wonderful thing and I believe we all wish we could experience the "great love". Deborah Santana is like many women. She fell in love with the "bad boy" and lost herself. She almost denied herself the great love and then had to work to make it last. You also realize that the world of music isn't all glamour - it is very hard work for everyone. I almost laughed when I found myself agreeing with her near the end when she discusses fidelity. This book isn't about an easy life - she fought for her identity and her heart. She went down many paths and finally, realized she was strong enough to stand up for what she thought was best for the children and herself. Everyone has faults and its how they deal with them and/or overcome them that is important. I have decided to keep the book afterall. Perhaps when I'm wondering about my thoughts, I might need a refresher course. Thank you Deborah Santana for writing this book for the rest of us.