Refreshingly free of self-serious dogmatism, the author’s study of other religions shows how it deepened his commitment to...
An American Catholic theologian offers a candid memoir about his unusual spiritual journey and a plea for ecumenical tolerance.
A checkered path led the author to his present calling as professor of comparative theology at the University of Notre Dame, as he recounts in these personal essays. Raised in upstate New York, Malkovsky drifted into the Catholic Church via the anti–Vietnam War movement and moved from monastic life to the study of theology in Germany, where he began to learn about liberation theology and “God’s preferential option for the poor.” His interests in the Hindu-Christian dialogue took him to the University of Pune, India, where he frequented the Christa Prema Seva Ashram and immersed himself in the study of Sanskrit. Malkovsky’s years in India profoundly influenced his sense of spirituality—by practicing yoga and meditation, being healed by an Ayurvedic physician, and observing closely the lives of the extremely poor and disenfranchised—but he also met a Muslim woman who became his wife. Though she converted to Catholicism, her family did not immediately accept her choice. Malkovsky shares how his witness and participation in Hindu and Muslim rituals such as burials and weddings have deeply moved and impressed him, adding yet another rich layer to the expression of human spirituality that can be understood and embraced by all. In a long chapter on yoga, the author takes aim at opponents of the practice, called “demonic” by some Catholics and Protestant evangelicals. For Malkovsky, yoga imparted a rigorous control over the body and a “healthy dualism” compatible with Christianity.
Refreshingly free of self-serious dogmatism, the author’s study of other religions shows how it deepened his commitment to his Christian faith.Pub Date: May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-184068-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
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
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