Spoto insightfully demonstrates that far from taming the man, Francis’s canonization made his life and example a wonderful...
In an approachable biography, Spoto (The Hidden Jesus, 1998, etc.) shows how the saint was both a product of a historical moment and transcendent of it.
Francis was a “popular and endlessly inventive wastrel,” as one acquaintance remembered him as a young man: he was a participant in the burghers’ revolt, an aspirant to knighthood, a classic example of the every-man-for-himself type of the early mercantile economy. But he became disillusioned with life and deeply depressed—so goes Spoto’s reading of the documents. He also lived at a time when revelations were taken seriously, and Francis was ripe for the voice that called him to service in the tiny chapel of San Damiano. That call, to repair the chapel, was just a stepping stone to a larger perspective, to renovate the entire churchly institution, quietly and by example. Spoto takes up the pivotal moments in Francis’s life as they’re caught in the historical record and looks at them within their medieval context. He suggests how Francis’s commitment to the poor could fit within the chivalric tradition, situates his actions before the Bishop of Assisi within the popular methods of medieval argument, and shows how his mastery of the inclinations of the flesh found echoes in the ages-old custom of ascetics in their pursuit of spiritual clarity. That his fraternity devolved into schisms and hierarchy hardly reflected Francis’s conviction of his role: “The Lord told me what He wanted: He wanted me to be a new kind of fool in this world.” That is, a jester, a wandering minstrel of God running against the grain of wealth and privilege, full of generosity, forgiveness, and good works. For Spoto, he attained “a condition of spiritual integrity that always upsets public presumptions and counters the selfishness and madness of power.”
Spoto insightfully demonstrates that far from taming the man, Francis’s canonization made his life and example a wonderful embarrassment to the church.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03128-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
