Some nuggets of insight are overwhelmed by a rambling, unavailing narrative.
Women on the fringes of the spiritual world.
In her first book, Shirk (Women’s Studies, English, and Creative Writing/Pratt Institute) seeks to examine why American women have “had to find their own ways [to divinity] outside the prescribed patriarchal orders,” but the narrative is too autobiographical and scattered to fully deliver on that promise. The author, whose eccentric family has roots in both the early Anabaptist movement and the Christian Science church, weaves her own journey of spiritual discovery throughout the book. Tied only to the edges of faith traditions, her journey leaves her mostly without answers. “If I have learned anything,” she notes, “it’s that the truth shifts. The modes by which to interrogate it must always change, and are always changing.” Each chapter revolves erratically around a central theme. In some cases, those themes fit her thesis well—e.g., explorations of early Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, and New Orleans voodoo priestess Marie Laveau. In some cases, the tie is more tenuous, as in her chapter on Sojourner Truth, in which Shirk compares Truth to her own grandmother. A chapter on Flannery O’Connor is obscured by a focus on New York City, and other chapters have little apparent bearing on the subject matter. In one chapter, the author spends pages on the subject of smoking, and another focuses on her brother’s mental illness. Feminism, family relations, and other similar subjects come into play, but the digressions serve only to pull readers away from the author’s main subject, and the occasional profanity sprinkled throughout seems forced. Rather than a book about women who have acted as spiritual leaders, this is a story about the author and her own search for identity.
Some nuggets of insight are overwhelmed by a rambling, unavailing narrative.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-953-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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