by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1993
Spiritual embroidery on everyday themes, with the accent on love and compassion. Crafton serves as a vicar at Seamen's Church Institute, a prominent N.Y.C. human-service establishment. Her claim to fame, however, comes from her status as one of the first women to be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church. She writes often about being a pioneer, most strikingly when describing how a visit to England, where resistance to women's ordination remains strong, left her ``shaken by culture shock.'' Hers is a warm, sensible voice, finding spiritual lessons in quotidian affairs Ö la Robert Fulghum, but with less wit and a dash more moral smugness. ``People are what matter,'' she says—and who could disagree? Many of her observations, like this one, skirt the edge of platitude or sentimentality, only to be rescued by her kindness and her ear for story. Crafton's lessons always come wrapped in anecdote. She and a gaggle of Girl Scouts dye Easter eggs at a shelter for the mentally ill, and she cries when a recalcitrant old patient comes out of his shell; make the right effort, she seems to say, and redemption comes in the most unexpected ways. Crafton remembers her good mother, who avoided anything grave or grim; she writes about fear of death, the precariousness of life (``so you'd better love what you have while you still have it''), the emotions engendered by moving out of her childhood home or being called a ``girl'' in middle-age (``I'll be one. When I choose to be''); and she complains about the new math. But the strongest essays are those in which she confronts real suffering: victims of AIDS looking for love, a paranoid parishioner who finds a home, memories of her dead child. Despite the author's priesthood, Christian images are scarce, although one lovely, atypical piece muses on the benevolence of the Virgin Mary. Generic goodwill, in appetizing bites.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-670-84113-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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