Entertaining essays on the inspiring work various sisters are accomplishing in the world.
How a group of sisters is making changes in the world.
If the word nun brings to mind an elderly woman in a black habit, Wall Street Journal contributor Piazza's (Love Rehab: A Novel in Twelve Steps, 2013, etc.) essays on the ten sisters she interviewed will definitely create a new image. Dynamic, vivacious, determined, peaceful and loving are just a few descriptors that could be applied to these women who have devoted their lives to God and to some of the most difficult causes in America. Sister Simone spent weeks at a time on a bus traveling across the country to protest the Republican budget that would have denied health care to the poor; Sister Megan, 82, broke into a high-security nuclear facility to protest nuclear weapons and warfare; Sister Jeannine risked the wrath of the Catholic Church to bring religious teachings to gay and lesbian Catholics. Other nuns work on saving women and children from the massive sex-trafficking market both in the U.S. and around the world. Another sister brings hope to women in prison, provides a home for their children until they're released, and continues to support the ex-cons after prison by giving them a home, food, clothing and an education. Piazza questioned each woman's motives and decision to become a nun, and many responded that they felt it as a deep calling at a young age and was the right thing to do, despite the challenges of being a nun in today's world. The women use prayer, meditation, exercise and a good diet to help them fight the negativity and stress they encounter on a regular basis, even from the church they belong to and devote their lives to supporting. Reading these stories may not convert anyone, but they should challenge plenty of stereotypes.
Entertaining essays on the inspiring work various sisters are accomplishing in the world.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497601901
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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