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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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