Rich details and solid storytelling convey one nun’s story of her dedication to God and her fellow humans.
The biography of a Catholic nun who was murdered while trying to help those in need.
Raised in an Irish Catholic family in Queens, New York, Maura Clarke’s decision to join the Maryknoll sisters and dedicate her life to working as a missionary for God came as no real surprise to her family and friends. “What drove Maura toward the convent was not a desire for safety or rigidity,” writes investigative journalist Markey, “but a sense of purpose, a desire to do practical good in the world and to lead a life that was big, significant, meaningful.” In 1959, Clarke accepted her first posting in Siuna, Nicaragua, where the locals were fighting against abject poverty under the Somoza regime. After several years there, Clarke had a short stint back in the United States before being reassigned to El Salvador, another country whose residents were battling for freedom under a strict government. The author ably blends the personal story of Clarke’s life and dedication to her belief in God and her work with the changes in procedures that have taken place in the Catholic Church in the past 60 years as well as the political, cultural, and societal upheavals that Clarke experienced in the foreign countries to which she was assigned. The combination of elements brings excitement, tension, and compassion to an overlooked story that illuminates the courage and dedication of the sisters toward their fellow humans while highlighting the cruelty and senseless violence that have plagued Latin America for decades. For anyone interested in learning more about the multiple civil wars in Central America and the roles the American government and these Catholic sisters have had in encouraging change, this book is a great choice.
Rich details and solid storytelling convey one nun’s story of her dedication to God and her fellow humans.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56858-573-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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