Accounts of genuine spiritual anguish and unspeakable loss commingled with humid, Harlequinesque passages.
A former cloistered nun tells in sometimes treacly prose how she chose God over the world, then fell in love with a priest, left the monastery, eventually married the (now ex-) priest, had children, suffered grievous losses.
In her debut work, Bissell, now a journalist in Minnesota (Cook County News Herald), employs a dawn-to-dusk framework, including sub-sections devoted to the daily monastic rituals, beginning with matins, ending with compline. The author experienced some unpleasantness in childhood—an alcoholic father, teen troubles with weight (her mother called her a “fat pig”) and with unkind coevals (she was mocked at her prom). Later, she lost weight, found a boyfriend but decided to become a Poor Clare when she realized that with God she would find a love beyond what any man could offer. Bissell’s most engaging segments concern her cloistered life as she learned to adapt to demanding routines of self-denial. She became anorexic, developed a quiet crush on the novice mistress but eventually found peace in bread-making. She also remembered a bad man who’d flashed his erection when she’d been a little girl—and a physician, examining her naked adult body, who had some stiffness issues of his own that he wanted her to resolve (she declined). When her father became ill in Puerto Rico, she received permission to stay with him. There, she met a hot Italian priest and developed a protracted “relationship” with him. Employing some moral relativism, she slept with the priest many times (but not in that way—really). Eventually, though, nature took its course, and the two, who’d once taken solemn vows of chastity, went at it in “a wild almost crazed consuming of one another.”
Accounts of genuine spiritual anguish and unspeakable loss commingled with humid, Harlequinesque passages.Pub Date: April 30, 2006
ISBN: 1-58243-348-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
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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