A sympathetic but unflinchingly honest testament of indoctrination and embattled faith.
An affecting account of one man’s experiences with the Catholic faith.
Near the beginning of Tracy’s heartfelt debut work of nonfiction, he describes a scene when he was a theologian in a Jesuit seminary and not yet an ordained priest. He was approached on the street by a young man seeking a blessing. It was an awkward moment, and there was a language barrier. Tracy mimicked the gesture of a blessing, telling himself it did the man no harm. “It was the best honest blessing I could give a young man who has no doubts about his faith,” Tracy reflects. “I’m an imposter.” The warning note in his head even so early on sets the tone for the remainder of his narrative, which follows him as a young man working his way through the long, elaborate stages of Jesuit life, from novitiate to juniorate to theologate and so on, always inquisitive and constantly challenging himself intellectually. He met an extraordinary gallery of Jesuit instructors and fellow hopefuls and realized on one level that his primary task was “building a spiritual life.” But under the surface, he also realized he was running on automatic pilot, less and less sure about the spiritual and intellectual certainties that are the hallmarks of the Jesuit order. When at one point an older instructor told him, “We never know when we will be taken off guard, because we can’t predict events in our lives,” he spoke with accidental prophecy: throughout the turbulent years of the 1960s, as Tracy taught and progressed in the order, he grew more disillusioned with the life he chose for himself (although the journey isn’t without humor, as when he attended a lakeside getaway with a few colleagues and discovered that “modern contemplatives could consume moderate amounts of McNaughton’s blended whiskey while doing God’s work”). In an account of remarkably unsentimental honesty, Tracy charts his falling away from the Jesuits and his eventual adoption of another life altogether. His memoir has no villains, no convenient turning points, and no cheap theatrics; instead, he limns the entirely more believable and sympathetic changing of a person’s heart over time. The result is a quietly powerful revelation of personal—and, despite everything, spiritual—reinvention.
A sympathetic but unflinchingly honest testament of indoctrination and embattled faith.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-51-485753-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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