Quiet yet resounding testament to genuine religious striving.
An elegant, sonorous story of how faith can turn and bite you clear through, from a son of the bitten.
Manseau, co-author of Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible (2004), is the child of two devout and disobedient Catholics, his father an excommunicated priest, his mother a former nun. Called to their vocations in Boston during the 1950s, his mother had exited the convent by 1968, but his father was still much involved with the Church. A product of Catholicism’s avant-garde, Bill Manseau felt he could meld his identity as a priest with a relationship with one he loved. Grace, authority and even God were at stake; the author’s father took the plunge and married. He joined a company of priests who had done so in hopes of reversing the Church’s policy of celibacy, which they believed had become a perversion of the early Christians’ belief that marriage was pointless given the imminence of Christ’s return to redeem the world. Instead, “hope for the world turned into hatred of it” in the celibate priesthood. Manseau’s work is a powerful narrative history of a vocation steeped in earthly influences. He rolls out the power networks of the priests, cops and politicians who ruled Boston; the lives of seminarians; and the evolution of progressive religious politics. After being excommunicated, his father remained a man of the people, believing in a Jesus who offered “respect, care, affection, healing” to all. Only late in the book do we learn the primary reason Manseau’s mother took off her habit; it will be all too familiar to members of the scandal-plagued Boston archdiocese. Nonetheless, Manseau feels intellectually and emotionally drawn to religion. His quest provides a study in contrast with that of his parents, yet the final chapter shows how close they remain.
Quiet yet resounding testament to genuine religious striving.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4907-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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