A spiritual quest that encompasses the roots of family and friendship - it will resonate with the women of Banner's...
Reflections on a friendship initiated 40 years ago in high school and reestablished across an ocean and a great cultural and spiritual divide.
Banner (In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality, 1992) and her friend Fran gravitated to each other in Inglewood (Calif.) High School, where football players were heroes and pom-pom girls their consorts. Banner and her friend were athletic, academic, and ambitious - that is, out of the popular mainstream. They supported and nurtured each other, with Fran's mother, Lydia, an artist and musician, providing inspiration for Banner, whose mother had died. The two friends' paths diverged at college, with Banner moving on to graduate school in New York City, an upwardly mobile marriage, and feminism. Fran's path was spiritual; with her first husband, she helped to found the Lama community in New Mexico and ultimately converted to Islam, settling with a second husband in Alexandria, Egypt, changing her name to Noura, and wearing the veil of the Muslim woman. How could two friends, so similar in adolescence, have taken such different paths? asks Banner. She doesn't answer that question exactly, but in the attempt she describes the bridge generation of women who came of age in the late 1950s, already rattling the cage of June Cleaver but not yet free of primary commitment to home, husband, and children. Banner is now, she says, a pupil, if not a devotee, of a Sufi practice once popular at Fran's Lama community. Exploring the past that brought them to these crossroads, Banner delves into family histories. Disturbed by Fran/Noura's willingness to submit herself to her husband, Banner is nevertheless encouraged by a new view of Muslim women, exemplified by Fran and by Jihan Sadat, that permits them to think, study, and act as powerful individuals.
A spiritual quest that encompasses the roots of family and friendship - it will resonate with the women of Banner's generation and beyond. (25 photos, not seen)Pub Date: Dec. 10, 1998
ISBN: 0-231-11216-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1998
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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