Ex-monk Fowler (Teaching Your Heart to Dance, not reviewed) tells the story of his life, celebrating self-discovery and scathingly attacking organized religion in general and Catholicism in particular. In the late 1940s, hundreds of American ex-servicemen joined the toughest and most regimented of the Catholic Church's monastic orders, the Trappists, only to find themselves confronted with the Second Vatican Council and the changed world of the 1960s, which challenged them to reevaluate many of the order's customs. Fowler grew up in Montana, plagued with doubts about himself and his masculinity. Enlisting in the Navy at age 17 in 1946, he exchanged his stepmother's Mormonism for the Catholic faith; in 1950 he entered the Trappist Abbey of the Trinity in Utah, where he was later ordained a priest. Encouraged by the questioning atmosphere of the '60s, he came to realize the neurotic and immature basis of his monastic life. In 1967 he left the abbey, lived as a priest- student near San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury area, and soon rejoiced in a new experience of freedom and sexual experimentation (somehow unconstrained by financial concerns). In 1970, Fowler left the Church and married a former nun. He writes off monastic life as a series of petty rules motivated by a futile delight in having one's life run by others and castigates the Catholic Church as a clinging mother who offers rudimentary spirituality at the cost of personal individuation. He aligns himself with Emerson and Joseph Campbell, maintaining that all religions are simply schools for self- actualization (and unsuccessful ones at that) from which we need to graduate. Fowler's personal search ``to be okay'' reads like the reversal of Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain and, unfortunately, has little to offer beyond euphoric pantheism. As he puts it, ``I am Eternal Existence expressing here as me.'' (author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-201-40977-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
