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 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
