Lyrical, subtle memoir.
Poet and novelist Larsen (The White, 2002) recalls the years she spent in a Roman Catholic convent, and why she decided to leave.
It was 1960, just before Vatican II, when, at 19, Larsen entered the convent. Becoming a nun was the thing you did if you were a Catholic girl from Minnesota who didn’t think marriage looked all that great. And Larsen loved God; she wanted to give her life to Him. (“Why not dedicate yourself to Him as completely as you could? It was a cinch. Why didn’t millions of people do this every day,” the author remembers thinking.) Her portrait of the Iowa convent is loving and respectful. She eloquently describes its hushed silence; the young nuns’ lessons in walking correctly (just so, careful not to swing your arms too vigorously or wiggle your hips at all); the Gregorian chants that “loomed hugely in our lives”; the textbook instruction about sex, so the novices would know what they were giving up when they took the vow of chastity. Larsen decided to leave the order in 1965 because she had issues with the vow of obedience. In general, her superiors were fair, if stern; they did not order her to do mind-numbing make-work or insist she wear a hair shirt. But they did insist that she become an English teacher, and they didn’t always understand the poetry she wrote. She began to wonder if Mother Superior really did know best. Finally, she made the break, and her account of an older nun taking her to Marshall Field’s to buy a green knit suit for the occasion is priceless. A few minor flaws (Larsen sometimes overindulges in the oh-so-lofty second person) in an otherwise luminous account.
Lyrical, subtle memoir.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-41360-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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.
