Offers a worthwhile look into the burgeoning interfaith youth movement.
Intriguing memoir by an American Muslim of Indian descent who discovered a calling to interfaith work.
Patel, a founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, traces the personal journey that led to the group’s formation and introduces readers to its philosophy. He describes his early years in suburban Chicago, “trying to fit in as a brown kid in a white world.” In college, the author explains, he came to view America as a source of oppression and violence and took up the banner of radicalism with a vengeance. A variety of experiences and the influence of friends and mentors taught him to exchange rage for caring, and his life took off in a constructive direction from there. Patel points out various moments when, had he fallen in with religious or political extremists, everything could have gone wrong. Instead, the YMCA, the Catholic Worker movement and other organizations occupied his energies. Figures as diverse as Eric Rudolph and Osama bin Laden started out as troubled youth like himself, Patel notes, but were taken in by mentors who taught hate and violence. The lesson? Reach out to young people with a positive message before others reach them with a violent one. From that simple realization and a deep interest in religious pluralism, Patel joined with others to start the Interfaith Youth Core, which provides opportunities for young people from diverse backgrounds to interact and learn from each other. The author’s message is compelling and overwhelmingly affirmative. His memoir is at times overloaded with detail, but it’s an entertaining page-turner that juxtaposes youthful mistakes with remarkable moments of insight.
Offers a worthwhile look into the burgeoning interfaith youth movement.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7726-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
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