A provocative, profound, and moving account of a modern spiritual life.
A memoir recounts a woman’s tortured decision to become a nun and her later crisis of faith.
Osta (Jeremiah’s Hunger, 2011) was raised in Syracuse, New York, in the 1950s and ’60s in a staunchly conservative Catholic household. She attended Nazareth College in Rochester, which was founded by the Sisters of Saint Joseph, and studied speech correction, inspired by her work with children with special needs. The author was troubled by the tumult of the times and deeply saddened by the news of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. But she was also roused by how the civil rights movement encouraged women to fight for their own brand of emancipation. She was drawn to a life of religious devotion but also disenchanted in many ways with the Catholic Church—particularly its failure to live up to the promise of its Vatican II reforms. She confided her misgivings to Sister Tee, who gently encouraged her to consider becoming a nun. To her family’s surprise, Osta became a postulant with the Sisters of Saint Joseph. She was assigned her first mission teaching eighth grade at the Saint Francis Xavier School in Rochester—and eventually became the principal of another school, Saint Michael’s, at age 28. Still, she remained uncertain about her calling and frustrated by the plight of parochial schools, which she says were underfunded and under constant threat of closure. Overall, Osta’s remembrance is most notable for its philosophical, meditative tone. For example, she ruminates intelligently on the difficulties of maintaining a vow of celibacy at the height of the sexual revolution (and how she turned down a wedding proposal to join the Sisters), the failings of the modern Catholic Church, and the nature of spirituality. As a result, her account is impressively erudite—as a college student, she sought guidance from the works of philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Søren Kierkegaard—and her prose is at once lucid and unpretentiously refined. Osta does linger too long at times on minute details of the Catholic school system and its institutional foibles, but the memoir as a whole remains thoughtfully engrossing throughout.
A provocative, profound, and moving account of a modern spiritual life.Pub Date: June 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-95379-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Cosmographia Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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 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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 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.
