Inspiring, if a touch hagiographic.
Imagine Sister Helen Prejean speaking Spanish.
Reporting duo Jordan and Sullivan—Washington Post writers who won the Pulitzer for a series of articles on the Mexican justice system—tell the life story of the extraordinary Mother Antonia, a Catholic sister who lives with and serves the inmates at Tijuana’s La Mesa prison. Mother Antonia is remarkable not only for the constant, countless works of service and mercy she performs, but also because of her background. She grew up well heeled in Beverly Hills and married twice, survived two divorces and reared seven children before moving to the prison. Her strong call to serve the downtrodden began when, unfulfilled by motherhood, her mediocre second marriage and a dull day job, Mother Antonia—then known by her given name, Mary—began collecting clothes and medical supplies that were sent to help the needy in Korea. She excelled in her charity work, and her reputation as an angel of mercy grew. In 1965, a priest acquaintance took her to visit La Mesa. The trip turned into a calling, and Mary, who could not get the suffering Mexican prisoners off her mind or out of her heart, began visiting La Mesa more and more frequently, sometimes spending the night. In 1977, after her second marriage fell apart and her children had grown up, she decided to don a habit and move to the prison. The second half of the story, which chronicles Mother Antonia’s work at La Mesa, drags a little. Admittedly, her good deeds are breathtaking: she convinces Mafia drug-lords to come clean; she gets food, glasses and toilet paper for the prisoners; she helps wrongfully incarcerated men go free. But chapter after chapter of this litany of good works grows tedious—unlike the first half, which culminates in Mary’s move to Tijuana, the second has no change, turning point, tension or climax.
Inspiring, if a touch hagiographic.Pub Date: May 5, 2005
ISBN: 1-59420-056-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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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