Rich details and solid storytelling convey one nun’s story of her dedication to God and her fellow humans.
The biography of a Catholic nun who was murdered while trying to help those in need.
Raised in an Irish Catholic family in Queens, New York, Maura Clarke’s decision to join the Maryknoll sisters and dedicate her life to working as a missionary for God came as no real surprise to her family and friends. “What drove Maura toward the convent was not a desire for safety or rigidity,” writes investigative journalist Markey, “but a sense of purpose, a desire to do practical good in the world and to lead a life that was big, significant, meaningful.” In 1959, Clarke accepted her first posting in Siuna, Nicaragua, where the locals were fighting against abject poverty under the Somoza regime. After several years there, Clarke had a short stint back in the United States before being reassigned to El Salvador, another country whose residents were battling for freedom under a strict government. The author ably blends the personal story of Clarke’s life and dedication to her belief in God and her work with the changes in procedures that have taken place in the Catholic Church in the past 60 years as well as the political, cultural, and societal upheavals that Clarke experienced in the foreign countries to which she was assigned. The combination of elements brings excitement, tension, and compassion to an overlooked story that illuminates the courage and dedication of the sisters toward their fellow humans while highlighting the cruelty and senseless violence that have plagued Latin America for decades. For anyone interested in learning more about the multiple civil wars in Central America and the roles the American government and these Catholic sisters have had in encouraging change, this book is a great choice.
Rich details and solid storytelling convey one nun’s story of her dedication to God and her fellow humans.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56858-573-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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