A short, intellectually lively spiritual biography.
A woman examines her mother’s 45-year hunt for religious truth.
Debut author Fraser set out to understand her mother’s dogged interest in the religious life, and the result is a kind of spiritual biography. Her mother, Peace, was born in New Zealand, the great-great-granddaughter of a prominent Christian reverend. But she wasn’t particularly drawn to religion until the age of 37, in response to the aching grief she experienced at the death of her mother, surprising because the two were never close. Peace joined the Anglican Church, and it immediately became her lodestar. She wasn’t entirely satisfied with the succor it provided, though, and started to explore other alternatives: first the writings of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, then Co-Freemasonry, the Theosophical Society, and finally Zen Buddhism. After “ten years in the bosom of the church,” Peace officially left to pursue a path of inner spiritual development. She spent 20 years as a practicing Buddhist, and 45 years after leaving the church, she returned to it, this time as a Presbyterian. Yet again, her reconversion seemed to be a result of painful loss—this time her dog’s death. While Peace’s journey seems meandering at a cursory glance, the author observes that an abiding interest in Jesus’ teachings was the philosophical thread that ran through all the permutations of her mother’s religious evolution. Fraser recounts her mother’s life to better understand this woman of contradictions—impulsive yet disciplined, philosophical yet doctrinal. This is a brief sketch of her mother’s odyssey, and often a profoundly meditative one. The author has embarked on a spiritual quest of her own, one characterized by a sense of urgency and seriousness, and spangled with great erudition. This is necessarily an intensely personal, even intimate investigation, but Fraser’s attempt to draw general philosophical conclusions pulls the book in the direction of more universal relevance. Her conclusions are sometimes quirky: the author ultimately attributes Peace’s attachment to the Christian church to her previous lives: “Her background in this life was not the Christian Church which leaves me with no other possibility to explain her attachment to it than to suggest that these experiences must have occurred at some other time and place.” This is, nevertheless, a thoughtful and engaging rumination, as well as a touching tribute to the author’s mother.
A short, intellectually lively spiritual biography.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4525-2930-1
Page Count: 148
Publisher: BalboaPressAU
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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