In an age when the religious life is foreign and mysterious to many, these self-revelations provide a worthwhile focal point...
Often poignant memoir of the author’s eight years with the Jesuits and his eventual decision to seek a different path.
Looking back on his entry into the Society of Jesus and the spiritual and emotional adventure that followed, Krivak tells his story from the perspective of his first, grueling “long retreat,” a time of silence and prayer specifically designed to further a novice’s clarity of calling during the initial year. That retreat was deeply formative for the author and shaped much of his journey as a Jesuit. Raised in northeast Pennsylvania, Krivak broke away from working-class roots to study poetry and philosophy before turning to the religious life. The chapters on his first year as a novice, detailing both the monotonous work of acting as beadle and the more introspective examination of his prayer life, set the tone. Throughout the book, the author shares his deepest fears, hopes and swings of emotion as he struggled with his calling. His studies and work took him from homeless shelters to inner-city hospitals and college campuses, from upstate New York to Russia and Slovakia. He describes the people he met and the situations he encountered with the skill of a storyteller, in prose that is erudite without being dry or aloof. His account of examining his soul, though fairly typical of this genre, is well-executed and enjoyable. We know from the first pages that Krivak fell in love and left the Jesuits, but the conclusion is emotionally charged nonetheless.
In an age when the religious life is foreign and mysterious to many, these self-revelations provide a worthwhile focal point for understanding its attractions and its pitfalls.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-16606-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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