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
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
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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