A memoir of the disillusionment and growth by a lapsed Catholic who learned of the church’s failings.
Moody (Seattle and the Demons of Ambition, 2004, etc.) once saw the Catholic Church as more of a home to him than his actual house. Eager to find a path to righteousness and inspired by the allure of a closer relationship with God, he threw himself into the care of the priests in the 1960s. But as the clergy sex-abuse scandals came to public light in the 1990s, he learned, to his alarm, that at a seminary he attended, 11 priests had abused hundreds of students for more than a quarter-century. The revelations prompted him to re-examine the life he once led and the men he respected and to see in a new and unsettling light that vulnerable time when he and his classmates had scant knowledge of their sexuality and perceived the behavior of the priests around them as beyond reproach. With the benefit of hindsight, Moody describes how secrets of the church remained hidden, even as he and his seminary friends bore witness to acts that later appalled him. As Moody reflects on the seminarians’ seclusion and ignorance of many aspects of life, he sees ways in which the church kept the priests’ misconduct hidden, but he nonetheless realizes that he had a hand in enabling behavior he now deplores. In this memoir, he interweaves reminiscences with snippets from notes he took and letters he sent to his family while in seminary. Together, they describe his growing awareness of horrifying memories with searing candor and a dawning sense of complicity that cut to the core of his feelings. A brave and eye-opening memoir by a writer who has stood on both sides of the wall between the public and the Catholic Church.
Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490354408
Page Count: 258
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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