An often engaging, if sometimes overly complex, remembrance.
A debut spiritual memoir by a prominent businessman and Unitarian Universalist minister.
Sherblom grew up in the little town of Tiverton, Rhode Island. His father, a Baptist minister, struggled to provide for his large family, and they lived in depressing squalor. An ambitious boy, the author set out on a lifelong quest to make something of himself, and he possessed an unusual, complex mixture of business acumen and spiritual hunger. In this detailed accounting, the author effectively uses his own personal story to highlight six guiding spiritual disciplines that have served him well, and which offer a model of personal development. Sherblom has good reason to use his own life as a case study, as he succeeded in ways that most people can only dream of. He attended Yale University, where he found the free-wheeling student libertarian Party of the Right appealing and also campaigned for presidential candidate Jimmy Carter in New Haven’s first ward in 1976. After meeting his wife-to-be, Loretta, the author attended Harvard Business School. “I received highest honors,” Sherblom writes. “This was an inflection point in my life. I would never be poor again.” Much of the book centers on the outstanding business career that the author had in the biotechnology industry, and business-book aficionados may find his detailed, strategic entrepreneurial moves to be of interest. However, the story sometimes gets bogged down in financial minutiae. Each section of this autobiographical chronology deals with a different spiritual discipline: “Resilience,” “Surrender,” “Gratitude,” “Generosity,” Mystery,” and “Awakening.” Along the way, the focus gradually shifts from the business world to the author’s second career as a prominent Unitarian Universalist minister, whose fascination with transcendentalism suits his life in Concord, Massachusetts, near Walden Pond. Indeed, the last two chapters are an intriguing departure from the concrete details of high finance; he shows how he deepened his potential for mystical experience, leading him to multiple spiritual awakenings. Each chapter ends with a set of guided questions to stimulate thinking and discussion.
An often engaging, if sometimes overly complex, remembrance.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63489-076-2
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Wise Ink Creative Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2017
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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