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
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
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