A plodding, shallow account of a year in the Christian life.
Harvard grad and social activist Breyer’s tale of her first year at an Episcopal seminary in New York City fails to illuminate.
Stringing together a series of disparate anecdotes about seminary life, the author never gets around to providing a coherent overview or deeper understanding. In one potentially fascinating scene, Breyer describes attending a retreat in Connecticut at which a Father Stephen tells the future ministers that popular culture today offers a confusing and ambiguous message about what priesthood is supposed to be. Instead of following up with her own thoughts on the nature of priesthood in the 21st century, the author digresses into an unrelated tale about a tragedy that struck Father Stephen’s parish. Similarly, Breyer notes that, in January, many of her classmates report experiencing a sort of culture shock during Christmas break, finding it difficult to leave the seminary cocoon and attend their parents’ churches. This presents an obvious opportunity to consider the relationship between a calling to ordained ministry and the rest of one’s life, but Breyer ignores it. Readers are left to wonder how her Jewish dad (Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer) reacted to her call to ordination and, more broadly, how wearing a dog collar affects everyday conversation and interactions with strangers. Breyer’s treatment of her commitment to social justice is equally disappointing; she describes getting arrested at an Episcopal Day protest, but doesn’t elaborate on why she participated or how she felt about incarceration. The sacrament of marriage gets short shrift too. Breyer arrives at seminary fresh from her honeymoon, but says nothing about her marriage as a spiritual journey. She hints that her husband does not share her enthusiasm for Christianity, but never tells us how spirituality affects their relationship, or vice versa. The closest she comes is her admission that Greg gets annoyed when she opts for studying over cleaning up the kitchen.
A plodding, shallow account of a year in the Christian life.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-465-00714-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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 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
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