A sprawling study that, though enlightening, takes readers on more of a journey than they may have bargained for.
A wide-ranging biography of the current pope.
Journalist Burns (La Roja: How Soccer Conquered Spain and How Soccer Conquered the World, 2012, etc.) admirably tackles a difficult subject but meets with mixed success. The author’s plan is evident: to introduce readers not only to Jorge Mario Bergoglio (now known as Pope Francis), but also to the setting in which he was raised, Argentina. What Burns presents, however, is largely a political history of modern Argentina, followed by a topical look at the young papacy. The result is unwieldy and untamed. Speaking often in the first person, Burns takes a guardedly positive view of the pope. As a young man, Bergoglio was deeply affected by populist President Juan Perón, and he remained a Peronist at heart throughout his life. Nevertheless, Bergoglio proved himself adept at navigating the terrifyingly choppy political waters of Argentina, surviving (figuratively and literally) a number of regimes and juntas through his years as a public figure. As head of the Jesuits in Argentina, and then as a bishop and later archbishop, Bergoglio found himself as an enforcer against leftist politics among his clergy while simultaneously working on behalf of the poor. Bergoglio is described variously as authoritarian and as pastoral, and Burns recounts a complex man shaped by the always volatile and sometimes-brutal realities of his nation. “While Pope Francis’s spirituality is not in doubt,” the author summarizes, “the life of Jorge Bergoglio, as Jesuit priest and bishop, was far from flawless, and deeply human in its vulnerability and complexity.” Without much of a transition, this imperfect character becomes pope, and the remainder of Burns’ work is dedicated to his papacy, seen from the view of various topics: poverty, economic scandal, gender, sexuality, etc. Francis comes across in each case as mildly positive as well as rather unpredictable.
A sprawling study that, though enlightening, takes readers on more of a journey than they may have bargained for.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-07649-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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