Pays thoughtful tribute to a woman who believed in spiritual and educational empowerment.
Meticulously balanced if dry account of the Catholic nun who turned a down-and-out Belfast school for girls into one of the best in Europe.
Sister Genevieve didn’t initially want to be a teacher; she joined the Sisters of Charity so she could work out in the world with the poor. Impressed with her talents for organization and leadership, her superiors sent her in 1956 to the new St. Louise’s Catholic School for Girls, and she soon became its principal. The students were slum kids from large families; fathers were often unemployed, mothers working in the linen mills the sole providers. Sister Genevieve was determined that their daughters should have better lives and jobs. Not every family supported her: during the tense years of the Troubles in the late ’60s and ’70s, some parents accused her of being a sellout to the British and the local Protestant authorities; and even in the 1980s she had to contend with objections from the family of a girl who won a scholarship to Cambridge that attending a university was a waste of time and money. British educator Rae persuasively shows that the headmistress saw her paramount duties as being first to God and then to her girls. She did what she could to help families affected by violence as some students joined the IRA, others had relatives in prison or killed by the British army. The reactionary, controlling, and condescending male diocese was almost as challenging to deal with as the IRA and the British. Born in 1923 in the Irish Republic, Sister Genevieve sympathized with the militants but wanted St. Louise’s to be a haven of peace and normality where the girls could continue to get an education. She constantly exhorted her students not to get caught up in the ghetto mentality that espoused violence and to always stand up for themselves.
Pays thoughtful tribute to a woman who believed in spiritual and educational empowerment.Pub Date: March 3, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-52824-2
Page Count: 296
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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