A direct, nuanced account of answering a religious call.
A memoir about one woman’s life both before and after her calling to be a Christian missionary.
Debut author Vovou begins her memoir with a memory from 1975. She was 16 and attending a church service in Alabama where her father was the pastor. She recalls a voice in her head telling her to go up and pray during the altar call. She heard the voice say “Chara, go! For this may be your last chance!” She believed the sound was the “unmistakable voice of God.” It would be quite a few years, though, before the author began her work as a missionary. First, she struggled through a difficult marriage, served as a nurse in the Navy, and eventually drove from New York to California. After attending a seminary in California, the author’s adventurous life as a missionary began. In her memoir, she describes casting out demons, building a school in Africa, and living in conditions many in modernized countries might find unthinkable. Throughout it all, her steadfast faith saw her through any number of trials. As the author phrases it, “You must just be willing to go where He calls you to go and do what He tells you to do.” Vovou balances the intensity of her devotion with a conversational tone and lighthearted anecdotes, like when she had to ride an elephant through a jungle. She was told to mount the elephant by climbing onto its ear. She refused. As she explains, “I felt like I would hurt the elephant. Well, how would you like someone climbing on your ears?” Many writers may tackle issues of faith, but the author’s ardent and personal style, combined with her less than direct path to her current vocation, give this memoir a unique appeal. Readers looking for actionable advice, however, might come up short. The author’s guidance—“To agree with God is simply to say a prayer from your heart”—reflects the author’s positivity but may be too abstract for some.
A direct, nuanced account of answering a religious call.Pub Date: July 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5462-0177-9
Page Count: 154
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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