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
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
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
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