The memoir ends as Jackowski takes her final vows—a good setup for a sequel, as readers will be left wanting to know how the...
The coming-of-age of one nun, and of the Catholic Church.
In 1964, Jackowski (The Silence We Keep, 2004, etc.) joined the Sisters of the Holy Cross in Indiana. Her first years in the convent coincided with the Second Vatican Council, which would transform the culture of the Catholic Church, even the culture of convents. Traditional black habits were exchanged for modest suits; male priests invited the sisters to preside with them at the altar; nuns began singing Bob Dylan songs at Mass. But this isn’t just a chronicle of turbulent change. Jackowski also writes about her appreciation of the traditional forms of Christian spirituality she learned as a young nun, especially silence and contemplative prayer. Living in close quarters with people she didn’t necessarily like taught her about community. Perhaps the most insightful—even transcendent—section is Jackowski’s discussion of the meaning of the three-fold vow of poverty, chastity and obedience: Poverty allows a sister to treat others with equality; celibacy allows her to love everyone equally; and true obedience is the commitment to listen to other people and discern the common truth. But Jackowski’s prose is uneven. She occasionally produces a lovely turn of phrase (every day was “wrapped in silence”), but too often her punishing attempts at humor fall flat (sisters practice self-denial: “nun of this and nun of that”). Jackowski is a natural, however, at character development. She has rendered more than a dozen distinctive, memorable characters, from stern Mother Octavia to hard-drinking Sister Concilio, who hid her liquor in a pink crocheted poodle.
The memoir ends as Jackowski takes her final vows—a good setup for a sequel, as readers will be left wanting to know how the changes of the late 1960s played out over the next three decades of the author’s life.Pub Date: March 15, 2007
ISBN: 1-59448-937-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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