Catholics and spiritual seekers of a liberal bent, however, will find Beck’s opinions refreshing and well stated.
Episodes, told both annoyingly and effectively, along one man’s road to Damascus.
Beck, a forty-something Catholic priest and member of the Passionist Order (which emphasizes the Passion of Christ in its daily observances), takes a God-as-homey approach to matters theological in his memoir of spiritual growth. There’s no trace of the Old Testament’s angry deity in his conception of the boss upstairs. Quite the opposite: “When God speaks my name,” he writes, “it is always as lover—never as angry parent or disgruntled spouse.” That highly personal approach leads Beck into reveries that would not be out of place in the more esoteric literature of the New Age movement, one of which reveries encourages the reader to imagine that prayer is a kind of chat with God “as if He was my best friend, sitting on the floor of my bedroom after winning a baseball game.” All is not warm and cuddly in Beck’s theology, however, and he takes issue with the official doctrine at many points, defiantly insisting that “our absolute moral obligation is always to follow our own conscience, and never to act against it. This presumes we take time to inform our conscience, which includes knowing the Church teaching, approaching it with respect, and being open to it. But it doesn’t mean we will always literally follow that teaching.” Readers with a pre–Vatican II sensibility will likely take constant issue with Beck’s view of matters such as priestly celibacy, homosexuality, poverty, marriage, and the role of women in the church—and with his penchant for citing the likes of Meryl Streep and Carly Simon while examining some moral point or another.
Catholics and spiritual seekers of a liberal bent, however, will find Beck’s opinions refreshing and well stated.Pub Date: June 17, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-50180-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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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