Richly allusive, impressively lucid, and unflinchingly honest: Johnson speaks as eloquently to the heart as to the head.
Novelist and memoirist Johnson (Geography of the Heart, 1996, etc.) details his journey from bitter skeptic to man of renewed faith.
Like the best writers on religion, Johnson never flinches at describing his own doubts, anger, and skepticism about its practices, but he is also scrupulously fair and open-minded. Raised Roman Catholic in a family of nine, he stopped believing in his teenage years and as a gay man is angry with his church for its attitudes about homosexuality and sex. Early in 1996, he accepted an invitation from a brother at the Trappist Monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky to attend an international convocation of Buddhist and Christian monks and lay contemplatives. He thought the experience might be useful for a novel he was planning, but instead found himself embarking on “a cross-country journey through the briars and thistles of faith, and (its traveling companion) desire,” searching for “what it means to have and keep the faith.” As Johnson records his experiences, memories of his past mix with accounts of his stays at Gethsemani and at two Buddhist centers in northern California. He observed and participated in the daily rituals, learning to meditate and work in silence with the Buddhists, attending the various services each day at the Monastery. Seamlessly blending personal experiences with historical and theological research, making numerous references to the Bible and Buddhist writings, as well as thinkers from Augustine and Plato, the author explores the connections among Christianity, Judaism, Greek philosophy, and Eastern religions. The early Christian church accepted women as equals, he writes, but today’s male-dominated organization has failed in its handling of desire and sexuality. Despite such criticisms, as his journey nears its end, Johnson has regained his faith, understanding now that belief is not a narrow creed, but “a form for and discipline of the imagination that preserves and promotes faith.”
Richly allusive, impressively lucid, and unflinchingly honest: Johnson speaks as eloquently to the heart as to the head.Pub Date: April 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-00442-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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