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
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
© Copyright 2026 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.
