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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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