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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
