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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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