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 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
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