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 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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