A refreshingly intimate memoir of a life in faith.
A noted Catholic sister recounts how joining the church became the first step on her path to becoming a social justice activist.
Born to an upper-middle-class Baton Rouge family, Prejean (The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, 2004, etc.) joined the Congregation of St. Joseph as a novice shortly after she graduated from high school in the late 1950s. Just 18 years old, she knew that her mission was to be an “obedient [daughter] of Mother Church” and find union with God. What she did not know was that her “Mother Church” would soon change forever. The liberalization policies developed by the Vatican II Council in the early 1960s not only affected how Prejean saw herself, but also how she understood her place, both in the church and in the world. Newly relaxed rules that allowed for more modern dress also permitted nuns and priests to openly mingle with each other. Testing her faith and the bonds she had developed with other nuns, the author became involved in an intensely emotional relationship with a troubled priest. Open conversations about the “complex new realities” of a world defined by the Vietnam War and emerging social justice movements challenged Prejean and other clerics to confront new and unsettling realities. Liberalization also allowed the author to pursue a degree in religious education and learn tools to help her “critique Church teaching in an intellectually honest way.” Yet it would not be until the 1970s that Prejean awakened to her true calling to help the poor and socially disenfranchised. In 1981, she began working as a volunteer educator in the all-black St. Thomas housing project, where she began the prison pen-pal relationship that would define the next chapter of her life as an anti–death penalty advocate. A modest storyteller, Prejean chronicles the compelling, sometimes-difficult journey to the heart of her soul and faith with wit, honesty, and intelligence.
A refreshingly intimate memoir of a life in faith.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6730-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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