Few readers will fully agree with what Church represented, but all will find his story instructive and masterfully told.
Detailed biography of a less-than-perfect liberal church leader.
Son of famed U.S. Senator Frank Church, Forrest Church emerged from the heady 1960s as a national leader of the Unitarian Universalist Association and a noted but controversial spokesman for what former Newsday book critic Cryer calls “liberal religion.” The author, who conducted numerous personal interviews with Church and those close to him, provides a truly comprehensive, warts-and-all examination of the man’s life. Spending much of his late-’60s college career at Stanford as a rather stereotypically underachieving pothead, Church rebounded from this destructive path only to be faced with the grand question of his times: how to avoid the draft. His chosen answer was to enter seminary, and despite less-than-sincere reasons for doing so, he ended up as a devoted scholar of religion. Drawn eventually into work as a clergy member of the UUA, he spent his entire career at the denomination’s flagship church in New York City, All Souls. While expanding his church and its mission and gaining a national audience through numerous books, Church also brought about the destruction of his marriage and almost of his own career through infidelity. Cryer, a longtime member of All Souls, dispassionately chronicles his subject’s often-chaotic life—that of an overachieving, workaholic, alcoholic, ne’er-do-well-turned-denominational doyen. Church’s story ends with his death from cancer in 2009, covered poignantly by the author. Cryer’s prose is approachable, educational and engaging, and readers will relive the upheaval of Vietnam, the advent of AIDS, the religious controversies of the ’80s, and even 9/11.
Few readers will fully agree with what Church represented, but all will find his story instructive and masterfully told.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-59943-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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