Second-person posturing and Lady Macbeth protestations aside, an open, honest contemplation of a spiritual impasse.
Duke Divinity School professor Winner (A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, 2008, etc.) examines her struggle to keep her faith.
In a previous memoir, Girl Meets God (2002), the author detailed her religious conversion to Orthodox Judaism and then Christianity. A decade and a divorce later, she looks at her Episcopalian life post-conversion. Shaken by her failed marriage and her mother’s death, Winner found herself in what she characterizes as an unsettling “middle” moment, “when the things you thought you knew about the spiritual life turn out not to suffice for the life you are actually living.” Throughout this provocative memoir, Winner maintains her insistent deflection of the personal. She claims the book is neither a “manual for ‘getting through’ the middle,” nor a “defense of Christianity,” nor a memoir—“it is not consistently storied enough to count, by my lights, as a memoir.” Yet the book’s most poignant moments are those obviously gleaned from intimate self-reflection or personal experience. While these “notes” may not adhere to the tight chronology characteristic of many memoirs, they do outline a linear spiritual progression common to Christian belief. These kinds of introspective works only succeed when the authors own their doubts and inspiration, which Winner does here, try as she might to claim otherwise. Note, for example, this evocative passage on the plight of losing the ability to pray: “when you don’t know what you believe…prayer sounds like a barefoot hike from Asheville to Paris: it would be nice if you got there, you are sure there is a nice glass of wine and a nice slice of brie waiting for you at some café somewhere, but there is really no way you can imagine actually making the walk.”
Second-person posturing and Lady Macbeth protestations aside, an open, honest contemplation of a spiritual impasse.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-176811-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
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 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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