Intriguing, absorbing, puzzling, surprisingly sexy, and very smart.
In her debut memoir, Christianity Today senior writer Winner recounts her two religious conversions, first to Orthodox Judaism, then to Evangelical Christianity.
The author’s Southern Baptist mother and Jewish father agreed to raise their children within Judaism, although according to religious law the girls were not officially Jews. A bookworm who loved studying and practicing the ins and outs of tradition, Lauren decided to officially convert as soon as she began her undergraduate education at Columbia University. Despite her wholehearted efforts, however—6 a.m. study sessions, her commitment to observe the laws of kashrut—she couldn't ignore the fact that just two years after her conversion, Jesus seemed to be calling her. How? There was the dream about being captured by mermaids, Winner writes, and there was the undeniable appeal of the mass-market, Christian-themed Mitford novels by Jan Karon. As a child of divorce, she may have been seeking the most stable, familial religion, Winner acknowledges, although that argument ignores a central fact: “Conversion is complicated . . . it is about family, and geography, and politics, and psychology, and economics. [But] it is also about God.” When pondering the author’s double conversion, one could also consider the fact that Winner was raised in the Christian South by a Christian mother. This is all secondary, however, to her narrative’s real strength, which is its addictive readability combined with the author’s deep knowledge of, delight in, and nuanced discussion of both Christian and Jewish teachings. Loosely structured around the progression of the Christian calendar, Winner’s text weaves together meditations on the meanings of the holidays, different modes of observance, and the day-to-day difficulties of switching teams and convincing people that this time she means it.
Intriguing, absorbing, puzzling, surprisingly sexy, and very smart.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-309-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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