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
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
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