Unilluminating tale of one woman’s lost faith.
Sentilles (A Church of Her Own: What Happens When a Woman Takes the Pulpit, 2008, etc.) recounts a childhood torn between two faiths—Catholic and Episcopalian—before deciding to become an Episcopal priest. While completing a doctorate program at Harvard Divinity School, the author finally admitted something she had long sequestered in the back of her mind—she does not really believe in God. Less a spiritual memoir than a cathartic exercise, Sentilles places the reader in the unwanted role of therapist as she shares the details of an upper-middle-class life gone awry. What becomes clear early is that the author’s understanding of God never developed beyond the childish concept of deity as a completely anthropomorphic figure, making her graduate studies that much more difficult. Sentilles was obviously not prepared to begin preparation for the priesthood (she admits to having never owned a Bible before entering seminary), and readers will be easily convinced that her faith was based far more upon herself than God. Though filled with unwarranted shame and guilt and plagued with a strikingly low sense of self, Sentilles manages to portray herself as completely self-absorbed at every point in her story: “The good things I did in the world had an ugly underside: I didn’t do them for others. I did them for myself. I did them to make people love me.” As the author moves slowly toward an obvious and inevitable conclusion, she forces unwanted tidbits on readers—the tale of her eating disorder, intimate details from failed relationships with men (“We kissed. He sucked on my toes.”) and even a graphic depiction of her urine test for Teach for America. Finally, after a tortured relationship, Sentilles broke up with God—a God she never saw as more than a boyfriend. A disappointing spiritual memoir.
Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-194686-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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