This account provides an engrossing look at what it means to be a minister’s wife.
A memoir chronicles the life of an Anglican minister’s spouse.
Stiller met her husband, Brent, in college in 1988. After Brent finished his master’s degree, he was ordained in the Anglican Church. The couple originally thought they might spend much of their adult lives working in Africa. But, as things turned out, they wound up living in various towns in Canada. The people in these towns had certain expectations about the wife of a minister. Some thought the author would be judgmental, know how to play the organ, or be upset if they didn’t pray properly before a meal. As Stiller explains, she was just as human as the next person. She was all thumbs with houseplants and felt pangs of envy about someone else’s spiritual life. In reality, friendships could be difficult. The Christmas season tended to be taxing. Words sometimes came out wrong. But while she experienced awkward situations, Stiller also found warmth and happiness. The author writes how, even with its challenges, church “helps us welcome each other, carry each other.” The book takes on a breezy, honest air as it moves between chapters with titles like “Community,” “Prayer,” and “Forgiveness.” There are remembered disagreements the author had with her husband and, perhaps most entertaining, strange things people said over the years. This is the case when a dinner guest asserted rather bluntly: “You have better stuff than we do.” Such recollections are not only funny, they also give readers a fine grasp of what Stiller’s life was actually like. Some episodes are not quite as telling. The author reflects fondly on swimming with a friend in Cold Lake, and, heartfelt though the memory is, it seems to just reiterate that friendships can be nice. Still, the good, the bad, and the beautiful are all finely blended here for a full picture.
This account provides an engrossing look at what it means to be a minister’s wife.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4964-4121-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Tyndale Momentum
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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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