With both humor and depth, NPR commentator and syndicated columnist Mathewes-Green describes a year in the richly liturgical life of the Eastern Orthodox Church, as experienced in a small Maryland parish founded by a group of recent converts. North America is currently witnessing a remarkable growth in the Orthodox Church, a faith distinguished by its icons, mystical writings, and vibrant ancient traditions. Mathewes-Green tells us what it's like to enter this unfamiliar and at first sight daunting world. Raised a nominal Catholic, she became a skeptic as a student and then embraced Hinduism, before returning to Christianity with her husband, Gary, as a result of an unexpected religious experience during their honeymoon. In 1977 Gary was ordained an Episcopal priest, but 15 years later, frustration with doctrinal and moral confusion in the Anglican Church led him, and eventually his wife and three teenage children, to Orthodoxy. Mathewes-Green's narrative is a 12-month journal, in which we get to know the 30-odd pioneers of the new parish as they make their way through their Church's intriguing cycle of festivals and fasts. We meet Gary in his new role as an Orthodox priest; Basil, a larger-than-life Greek who has rediscovered his early faith; and the young couples who form the bulk of this lighthearted but fervent community. Mathewes-Green intersperses anecdotes about her friends and family with vivid descriptions of the services and their ancient texts. While she succeeds in writing about this traditional Eastern Christian faith from a contemporary, distinctively American perspective, she does not pursue her insight that Orthodoxy has a special appeal to men, and she tends to play down the role of the different ethnic jurisdictions in American Orthodoxy. A mine of information about the customs and spiritual life of the Orthodox Church, presented in a very human and accessible way.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-065498-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
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
PERSPECTIVES
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