Kennedy (Psychology/Loyola Univ.) evokes the memory of his friend Cardinal Bernardin in a literary portrait that aspires to poetry and sometimes succeeds. Kennedy, who has written 40 books, including a lengthy 1989 biography of the late cardinal, is ideally suited to reflect on the career and inner person of Joseph Bernardin. The two were friends since they first met in 1967 as coworkers on a study of the American priesthood, sponsored by the then newly founded National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB). Bernardin's most intense public experiences—his central part in drafting the NCCB's pastoral letter on nuclear war, published in 1983 as The Challenge of Peace, his appointment as archbishop of Chicago, his response to the false charges against him of sexual abuse—are all remembered from the standpoint of the admiring and devoted friend. The sparer Kennedy's prose, the more Bernardin's spirit shows through it, as at the end of the book, where the simple grace of the words mirrors the cardinal's own graceful acceptance of death. But the excess metaphor in earlier sections makes a gaudy frame for the basic simplicity of goodness Kennedy wants to reveal in his friend. Goodness may, in any case, be more complex for Kennedy than he lets on. Along with Bernardin's gentleness, Kennedy insists repeatedly on the cardinal's manliness. That defensive posture puzzles until, in an offhand reference late in the book to another priest's attributes, gentleness is made out to be a feminine (motherly) quality. Kennedy expresses, but does not acknowledge, a tension that must be especially acute for priests, between sex roles defined by secular culture and codes of moral virtue preached by the Church. Bernardin's saintliness shines through in this memoir, but less brightly than it might have, had the paradoxes in priestliness only intimated here been more directly addressed. (12 illustrations)
Pub Date: Nov. 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-17118-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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