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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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