Excerpts from Bergoglio’s writings give an even more intimate look at our current pope, although it’s unfortunate Shriver...
The author’s personal journey to find out whether the new pope is “the real deal” and thereby get in closer touch with his own Catholicism.
Son of Sargent Shriver, whom he wrote about in his memoir, A Good Man (2012), and president of Save the Children Action Network in Washington, D.C., Shriver traveled to Buenos Aires and elsewhere to speak with former colleagues and acquaintances of Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, to get a sense of his long spiritual journey. Having been schooled by the Jesuits in Ignatius of Loyola’s creed to “go forth and set the world on fire for the Lord,” Shriver hoped his largely anecdotal memoir would help enrich his own faith. Born in 1936 to a family of Italian immigrants in the Flores barrio of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio was raised under his devout Catholic grandmother at the height of the “cultural earthquake” of Peronismo in Argentina. Surprisingly, Bergoglio studied science, which gave the pope, in the words of another Argentine theologian and Jesuit, “a strong sense of reality, of the superiority of experience over ideas.” Shriver visited the humble confessional in the Basilica of San José de Flores, where the 16-year-old Bergoglio heard the voice of God, changing his life’s direction in September 1953. The author pursues Bergoglio’s early years in the Society of Jesus, where he developed a reputation as an authoritarian and disciplinarian, which stood in contrast to a greater opening and tolerance in the church. In Latin America, this would play out as Marxist-inspired liberation theology during the tumultuous Dirty War in Argentina, when Bergoglio served as novice master and then climbed the clergy ranks at a time of enormous confusion and deception. Whatever the truth, Shriver layers on accolades from Bergoglio’s admirers over the years, alternating with stories of the author’s own father and faith.
Excerpts from Bergoglio’s writings give an even more intimate look at our current pope, although it’s unfortunate Shriver was unable to interview him.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9802-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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