Intriguing, absorbing, puzzling, surprisingly sexy, and very smart.
In her debut memoir, Christianity Today senior writer Winner recounts her two religious conversions, first to Orthodox Judaism, then to Evangelical Christianity.
The author’s Southern Baptist mother and Jewish father agreed to raise their children within Judaism, although according to religious law the girls were not officially Jews. A bookworm who loved studying and practicing the ins and outs of tradition, Lauren decided to officially convert as soon as she began her undergraduate education at Columbia University. Despite her wholehearted efforts, however—6 a.m. study sessions, her commitment to observe the laws of kashrut—she couldn't ignore the fact that just two years after her conversion, Jesus seemed to be calling her. How? There was the dream about being captured by mermaids, Winner writes, and there was the undeniable appeal of the mass-market, Christian-themed Mitford novels by Jan Karon. As a child of divorce, she may have been seeking the most stable, familial religion, Winner acknowledges, although that argument ignores a central fact: “Conversion is complicated . . . it is about family, and geography, and politics, and psychology, and economics. [But] it is also about God.” When pondering the author’s double conversion, one could also consider the fact that Winner was raised in the Christian South by a Christian mother. This is all secondary, however, to her narrative’s real strength, which is its addictive readability combined with the author’s deep knowledge of, delight in, and nuanced discussion of both Christian and Jewish teachings. Loosely structured around the progression of the Christian calendar, Winner’s text weaves together meditations on the meanings of the holidays, different modes of observance, and the day-to-day difficulties of switching teams and convincing people that this time she means it.
Intriguing, absorbing, puzzling, surprisingly sexy, and very smart.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-309-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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
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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