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
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
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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