In her debut, essayist, poet and former minister Jordan recounts a moving, humorous slice of her past spent pastoring a small congregation in Arizona.
Spanning five years in the 1990s when the author was in her 50s, Jordan’s memoir artfully interweaves strands of her interior life, memories of earlier times and accounts of events from her ministry. Readers witness the author’s fears and doubts unfold on a grand scale, even as she conscientiously conducts mundane ministerial duties. Jordan confronts tragedy in her parish and in her family, while comedy bubbles to the surface when conservative parishioners rub up against Jordan’s unorthodox theology. “They’d want to explore my thinking about…Jesus,” she says upon first visiting the church. “While I served in Jesus’ name and thought of him as a model of goodness, I rejected the idea that he was a risen son of God….Instead, Jesus was a wise counselor like Harvey, the six-foot rabbit—a comic character in a play—who looked on and commented on the action. I’d have to make sure this little church was ready for me and Harvey.” Compassionate, robust descriptions of Jordan’s flock highlight both foibles and strengths, ensuring the reader’s emotional investment. Keenly aware of her own fragile humanity, the author self-identifies as a vulnerable seeker in a clerical collar looking for personal validation through life’s turmoil. She seeks emotional healing, marital restoration, knowledge of the transcendent and a way to shepherd her small flock—even the obnoxious ones. As she finally chooses to face the consequences of her persistent skepticism, Jordan’s articulate descriptions of wrestling with pivotal Christian doctrines evoke empathy, self-examination and admiration for her personal integrity. Enriching the memoir is the author’s attention to a broader sense of time and place; she frames many of her youthful expectations and decisions within the zeitgeist of her relatively simple 1950s upbringing, though she vividly documents the jarring realizations, in later years, that life turned out to be far more complex. A singular window into the spiritual journey of a progressive female minister, particularly relevant as Christianity wrestles with the roles of women in the church.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1938690204
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Two Harbors Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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