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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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