A charismatic storyteller shares a life lived against the grain.
The debut memoir of an out lesbian who seeks to become an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) recounts the unexpected way that she was called to God.
“If anyone tells you they have ‘the answer,’ run in the opposite direction,” Tuttle advises her daughter at one point in this memoir after an unpleasant experience involving members of the Unification Church. It’s an unexpected sentiment in a book about one woman’s call to the ministry, but none better describes Tuttle’s unconventional life path. The author was raised as an “army brat” by religious parents with a keen sense of justice. In 1969, she became pregnant and rushed into a doomed marriage. Her time supporting her actor husband exposed her to new people and ideas. Soon, she discovered feminism and, after a chance encounter with Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon’s 1972 book, Lesbian/Woman, her true sexuality. For some, being a single, lesbian mother raising a daughter in the 1960s and ’70s would have been challenge enough, but after a bad breakup and a period of deep prayer, Tuttle also had an overwhelming religious epiphany. She hoped to serve the Presbyterian Church as an ordained minister, but her status as an out lesbian meant that she would face challenges at every turn. As an author, Tuttle is charming and self-effacing, and she approaches her story in the same manner in which she lobbied for herself within the Presbyterian Church—with patience and reason. Her passion for God and her certainty of purpose come across as sincere, and she effectively shares her sense of excitement throughout, even when describing the hatching of some praying mantises or the personality of an old building’s architecture. Much of the book is about exposing prejudices; in the case of the church, she asserts that financial motivations, under the guise of “tradition,” have impeded her ordainment. Her discussion of injustice is also broad in scope, citing such things as her experiences with racism as a young girl and her sexual assault during a breast examination.
A charismatic storyteller shares a life lived against the grain.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5326-5573-9
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Wipf and Stock
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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 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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