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
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
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